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!

Eight Romance Languages and Spanish majors have won Boren Scholarships to study critical languages, committing to a year of federal service after graduation. Close to half of the students in this record group of UGA Boren Scholars will spend a capstone year in Brazil with our Portuguese Flagship Program. 

Graduate students from the Portuguese and Spanish programs in the Department of Romance Languages represented the University of Georgia at the Tenth Chicago Graduate Conference in Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latinx Studies, one of the premier interdisciplinary conferences for emerging scholars in the field. UGA was represented by Diana Trindade Drumond, Fabio Mariano, Yasmin Paiva de Siqueira, Fabio Passos, and Francisco Zamparini, whose participation showcased the strength and breadth of the department's graduate research.

The Department of Romance Languages at the University of Georgia proudly recognizes two exceptional graduate scholars whose work reflects excellence in research, teaching, and interdisciplinary inquiry.

Flor Adams, PhD Candidate in Hispanic Linguistics, has received the 2025–2026 Romance Languages Distinguished Research Publication Award for the article “Speculative Fabulation as Inquiry: Creative Approaches to Language Research,” published in Qualitative Inquiry (2026).

University of Georgia senior and Spanish major in the Department of Romance Languages Eliza Fausset has been selected as a 2026-28 FAO Schwarz Fellow, earning a place in one of the nation’s most selective postgraduate fellowship programs focused on social impact and nonprofit leadership.