Congratulations to Romance Languages doctoral students Vera Bulla and Bethany Bateman McDonald, who have won UGA's prestigious Excellence-in-Teaching and Excellence-in-Research Awards!

Welcome to João Pedro Gomes! This is his first semester teaching Portuguese to UGA students as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FTLA) in the Department of Romance Languages. He shares his reflections on the importance of language learning and culture:

Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri, professor of French at the University of California San Diego, will give a lecture entitled “Ahmad al-Hajarî, Worldmaker.” Zhiri will be hosted at UGA by the Early Modern Studies Research Group, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant-funded research project in the Global Georgia Initiative of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Matching funds are provided by Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the departments of English, History, Romance Languages, and Theatre and Film Studies.

Congratulations to Evelyn Saavedra Autry, a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Studies, who has been granted the prestigious and highly competitive Dissertation Completion Award for her work on "Indigenous Female Subjectivities and Andean Voices in Contemporary Cultural Productions of the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000)."

Two Romance Language majors have been granted Fulbright English Teaching Assistantships. Please join us in congratulating Geoffrey Nolan (Spanish and International Affairs) and Melissa Siegel (French, Political Science, and Sociology), who will be travelling next year to teach English in Baranquilla, Colombia and Malaysia, respectively. Follow this link to an interview with them in Georgia E-News!

Come see the colloquium presentation entitled: “How to teach the Spanish Present Progressive to L1 English Students to avoid Negative Crosslinguistic Influence?”

See attached flyer for presentation abstract.

This story was originally published in The Franklin Chronicles on October 30, 2025

This fall, Sharina Maíllo-Pozo, associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages, taught a First Year Odyssey class focused on rapper, singer, and record producer Bad Bunny and the reggaetón music genre, which encouraged students to engage with Bad Bunny’s music from global and personal perspectives.  

Dr. Giampaolo Molisina of the University of Georgia’s Department of Romance Languages, delivered the keynote address at Florida Atlantic University’s Film Retrospective dedicated to Rome on November 6. The event, organized by FAU’s Italian Program within the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature, brought together an enthusiastic audience of graduate and undergraduate students as well as members of the local community.

We will welcome Dominican author and screenwriter Miguel Yarull as our guest speaker. His talk, From Page to Screen: Exploring the Dominican Dream, Identity, Translation, and Film, promises to be a compelling exploration of literature and cinema.

Next week, students and faculty in Romance linguistics will be presenting linguistic research on Romance Languages at the 2025 Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, hosted by the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ November 13-15, 2025