Faculty Profiles
Indiana University, Bloomington, College of Arts + Sciences
Vivian Nun Halloran, Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities and Professor of English, College of Arts + Sciences, is a scholar of Caribbean literature, food studies, contemporary American and world literature, postmodernism, and popular culture. She is Professor of English, core faculty in the Human Biology Program, and is affiliate faculty in the departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese. She is the author of Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (2023) and The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (2016) from Ohio State University Press and Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (2009) from University of Virginia Press.
Dr. Maria E. Hamilton Abegunde, Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, is the inaugural recipient of the Ph.D. in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Her research and creative activity center memory, trauma, and healing, and responds to the following questions: How do the unresolved traumas of our ancestors impact us? How can the arts create community-based spaces for researching historical harms? How can African-centered and contemplative practices help individuals and communities reflect on these traumas and harms without further injury, and in ways that lead to healing and justice? Before coming to IU, Dr. Abegunde worked in elementary school education for over 20 years and as an independent teaching artist. As a result of the latter, Captain Bill Pinkney invited her to be the lead team teacher for the first leg of Middle Passage Voyage project, an experiential voyage in which teachers from around the country were selected to sail and teach about the Middle Passage routes. Dr. Abegunde and her team sailed from Puerto Rico to Brazil over a two-month period. At the invitation of Dr. Sylvia Frey, Dr. Abegunde also served as poet and ritualist-in-residence for the UNESCO-Transatlantic Slave Trade Route-USA Project for eight years. Dr. Abegunde is the author of one poetry collection, What Is Now Unanswerable, inspired by the 1992 murder of Tammy Zwicki, and two poetry chapbooks, including Wishful Thinking about the 2001 disappearance of Tionda and Diamond Bradley in Chicago. She is the commissioned poet for the exhibitions Be/Coming, Keeper of My Mothers’ Dreams, Sister Song: The Requiem, Ancestral Masquerades, and the Lynch Quilts Project. She is a trained facilitator and trainer in Civic Reflection Dialogue and Powerful Conversations on Race.
Carey Champion, Associate Librarian, and Director, Wylie House Museum, holds degrees in Sociology and Library and Information Science from Indiana University, with a master’s concentration in Archives and Records Management. As director of the Wylie House Museum and an IU librarian, she leads initiatives that connect the museum’s historic collections with the university’s academic mission. Carey serves as the key liaison between the museum and faculty, students, and researchers, facilitating meaningful engagement with its object and archival holdings. Her work is informed by a diverse professional background, including roles as a community health educator and collections manager at the Monroe County History Center. Carey’s research interests focus on the role of cultural and historical museums in higher education, interpretive change at heritage sites, and innovative approaches to teaching and learning with primary sources and material culture.
John Nieto-Phillips, Associate Professor, Department of History, has researched and taught histories involving Latinas and Latinos. Nieto-Phillips is especially interested in ways that culture, language, and education have shaped what it means to be an "American." Nieto-Phillips' first book explores these themes. The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s, retraces national and regional debates over New Mexico’s admission into the Union in 1912, and critically examines the decades-long evolution of a “Spanish American” identity.
Olimpia E. Rosenthal, Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, is a scholar of colonialism in Latin America. She specializes in literary and cultural production that reflects material practices of domination, the long-term effects of colonization, and the ways in which imperial power has been challenged. Her research focuses primarily on the early colonial period but also highlights the ongoing effects of this foundational period and considers how it is remembered and reimagined in postcolonial narratives, cultural production, and contemporary scholarship. Her methodology is comparative and interdisciplinary. Her published work considers textual, visual, and archival sources from Spanish and Portuguese America, focusing on case studies from Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. In her monograph, Race, Sex, and Segregation in Colonial Latin America (Routledge, 2022), she traces the emergence and early development of indigenous segregationist policies in the second half of the 16th and early 17th centuries. The project traces how rubber-producing plants became a global commodity—emphasizing the disastrous environmental impact and brutal labor exploitation that ensued as a result—and foregrounds the links between botany, plant commodification, and imperialism.
Christopher D. Sapp, Professor of Germanic Linguistics, received his PhD in Germanic Studies at Indiana University in 2006. After teaching at the University of Mississippi for 14 years, Prof. Sapp joined the faculty of the Indiana University Department of Germanic Studies in 2020. In addition to many journal articles in the field of historical and diachronic Germanic linguistics, Prof. Sapp is the author of three books: The verbal complex in subordinate clauses from Medieval to Modern German (2011), Quantifying expressions in the history of German: Syntactic reanalysis and morphological change (with Dorian Roehrs) (2016), and Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda: A multifactorial analysis of linguistic features (2022).
Rex Sprouse, Professor of Linguistics, received his PhD in Germanic linguistics at Princeton University in 1989. After teaching at Bucknell University, Eastern Oregon State College, and Harvard University, Prof. Sprouse joined the faculty of Indiana University in 1994, first in the Department of Germanic Studies, then in Second Language Studies, and now in Linguistics. Prof. Sprouse’s research interests lie primarily in nonnative language acquisition and in historical and diachronic linguistics. He focuses primarily on languages of Western Europe and the Middle East. Prof. Sprouse is currently an Associate Editor of the journal Language Acquisition and is the Director of the Indiana University Multilingual Arabic, Persian, and Turkic Research Lab.
Caleb Weintraub, Associate Professor of Art in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, has exhibited nationally and internationally. Upcoming shows include: Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago; Rhode Island Museum of Science and Art; and the International Museum of Art and Science in Texas. Two of his paintings are featured in the book Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture published by Front Forty press, distributed by University of Chicago Press. He has been an artist-in-residence at Redux Art Center in South Carolina and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Significant group shows include exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Scion Art Space in Los Angeles.
César Félix-Brasdefer holds positions as a Professor of Spanish and Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and as an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Second Language Studies and in the Cognitive Science Program. His research areas are Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, two disciplines of linguistics that examine pragmatic meaning at the utterance level and beyond the sentence. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses such as Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics, Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatic Variation, Research Methods in Linguistics, Intercultural Pragmatics, and Second Language Pragmatics.
Miguel E. Ayllon joined Indiana University as associate vice president for international affairs in September of 2023. Miguel came to IU from the University of Missouri–Columbia where he worked for more than 15 years and most recently served as Executive Director for International Partnerships and Study Abroad. In this role, he led the central study abroad office, managed relationships with international partner universities, and advised the vice provost for international programs on relationship priorities. During his tenure in Missouri, the College of Engineering set a record for study abroad enrollment and forged its first academic collaborations with Latin America. Miguel has also contributed as a panelist in Research Initiation in Engineering Formation panels for the National Science Foundation.
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Dr. Claudio Molina Salinas holds a Bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature, a Master’s degree in Hispanic Linguistics, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His research interests focus on the study and description of cultural heritage terminology, specialized lexicography (terminography), and documentary languages. Among his most representative and recently published academic works are: A Methodology for the Construction of a Conceptual System for a Thesaurus of Spatial Arts in Mexico (2018), Development of a Numismatic Dictionary Based on International Standards for the Cataloging of Cultural Objects (2017), Neologism and Neologicity: Toward a Characterization of the Phenomenon in Spanish (2015), and Toward a Normalization of Frequency in the CREA and CORDE Corpora (2015). He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas) at UNAM. There, he is developing a project on the theoretical foundations and methodological principles required for the construction of a terminological knowledge database for the arts and archaeology in Mexico.
Dr. Ricardo Mansilla has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Sciences and Humanities at UNAM for 25 years. He is currently on a temporary assignment at the Peninsular Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, also at UNAM. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Havana, Cuba. He has been involved in and collaborated on interdisciplinary projects in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences for 25 years.
Dra. María Ximena Gutiérrez Vasques is a researcher specializing in computational linguistics and AI, with an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human language. Her research focuses on natural language processing, linguistic diversity, and the development of technologies for minoritized languages in Mexico. She recently held a postdoctoral research position at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is currently an associate professor at CEIICH (UNAM) where she works at the intersection of the humanities and artificial intelligence within the program “Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet."
Dr. Luis Josué Lugo holds a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences and a Master’s degree in Political Communication/Technologies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He completed a graduate research fellowship at the University of Seville. He is currently an Associate Researcher “C” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH) at UNAM. His work focuses on the sociopolitical consequences of artificial intelligence (AI), the development of digital methodologies, and technopolitics for collective action. He has coordinated more than 20 projects, including “Ethical Use of AI: From Critique to Praxis” and “Digital Literacies and Self-Referential Narratives with Migrants”. He has also authored three books, including “Ethical Guide for the Use of Artificial Intelligence.” Currently, he coordinates the International Seminar on Artificial Intelligence for the Social Sciences, directs Tesicafé, teaches the AI Laboratory for the Social Sciences in UNAM’s graduate program, is pursuing training in psychoanalysis, and contributes as a columnist to Generación Universitaria, a publication of El Universal.
Dr. Juan Pablo Duque is a Psychologist from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with a Master’s degree in Psychosocial Research and Intervention from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), a Master’s degree in Communication from UNAM, a Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from UNAM, and a Ph.D. in the Person and Society in the Contemporary World program from UAB. He is a researcher in the Portraits of Bios in the Contemporary Societics (POBICS) research group at UAB and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). He is also a professor at UOC, Spain, in the Faculty of Psychology, and in the Graduate Program in Political and Social Sciences at UNAM, where he teaches the Artificial Intelligence and Interdisciplinarity Laboratory. He serves as a Full-Time Associate Researcher “C” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities (CEIICH), within the Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Internet program. He is the coordinator of the Research Horizons on Artificial Intelligence from the Social Sciences working group of the Mexican Council of Social Sciences (COMECSO), and coordinator of the seminar Artificial Intelligence, Personal Data, and Mental Health: Cognitive, Legal, and Emotional Structures in Technological Society at CEIICH. He is also a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SEHCITI).
Dra. Isabel Galina is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas (IIB), and her work focuses on digital documentary heritage, digital preservation, and digital repositories and libraries. The IIB oversees the Biblioteca Nacional, the national library of Mexico, and much of her work has focused on the implications of digital materials, both digitized and born-digital, to the notions of a national collection and bibliographical heritage. She is a founding member of the Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD), a digital humanities organization based in Mexico. Among her recent projects is the creation of a Digital Humanities Lab at the national library that seeks to find ways to increase the use of its digital collections for teaching, research and public outreach in new and innovative ways, and to help articulate projects that are currently carried out in different parts of the UNAM and other universities, that focus on digital materials from the Biblioteca Nacional.
Dr. David Pruneda Sentíes holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Bibliographic Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, UNAM) and has served as an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (UNAM) since 2014. He completed two postdoctoral appointments at the Institute for Research on the University and Education (IISUE) from 2024 to 2026. He has supervised undergraduate and graduate theses and has served on thesis examination committees at both levels. He has published articles in peer-reviewed and indexed international journals that propose and discuss innovative approaches to literary studies. His current research focuses on the study of Digital Humanities laboratories in Latin America and on how digital objects are investigated within these spaces. He is a candidate member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers and Researchers (SNII).
Dr. Ricardo Maldonado earned his Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of California in the United States. From a cognitive perspective, his research focuses on the study of syntactic voice, particularly the middle voice, as well as issues related to dative reflexives, possessive causatives, aspect, and mood in the Spanish language, as well as in several Indigenous languages of Mexico, especially Huastec, Maya, and Purépecha. Another of his research areas centers on the study of conceptual construals—such as construal, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, perspective, scope, and related phenomena—that shape the interaction between syntax and both semantic and pragmatic meaning. His most recent work focuses on the formation of discourse markers from lexical bases, as well as on the study of evidentiality and epistemic modality. In parallel, he has conducted research on various cognitive phenomena involved in child language acquisition.
Dra. Leticia Colín holds a Bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the Acatlán Faculty of Higher Studies (FES Acatlán) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She completed her Master’s and Ph.D. studies in Linguistics at the Autonomous University of Querétaro (UAQ). In 2014, she received an award at the 2nd Meeting of Young Researchers of the State of Querétaro in the area of Social Sciences and Humanities. She conducted a research stay at The Ohio State University in 2015 and a doctoral research stay at the University of Vigo, Spain, in 2018. She has participated in the organization of academic events such as the Linguistics Conference Series at the Faculty of Languages and Literature of UAQ and the First UNAM-UAQ Colloquium on Evidentiality. She is currently a researcher at the “Juan M. Lope Blanch” Center for Hispanic Linguistics of the Institute of Philological Research (UNAM), where she is conducting a research project on the different ways of expressing directionality in Spanish. At the same time, she participates in a project that analyzes academic and journalistic discourse from a gender perspective. Her research interests include the syntax–semantics interface, cognitive linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, variationist studies, and discourse analysis. She is currently a Candidate Researcher in Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNI) and serves on the editorial board of the journal Anuario de Letras.
Dr. Fiorella Mancini, Academic Secretary of Humanities Coordination-UNAM, holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the National University of Rosario (Argentina), a Master’s degree in Population Studies from FLACSO-Mexico, and a PhD in Social Science from the Center for Sociological Studies at El Colegio de México. She is a Full-Time Senior Researcher (Titular A) at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIS-UNAM) and a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Political and Social Sciences. She is a Level II member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNI) and holds a PRIDE Level D distinction. In 2014, she received the Mexican Academy of Sciences Award. Her main lines of research include: Social inequalities and intragenerational social mobility; and Labor markets and employment in Latin America. Recent publications include: Gender and class inequalities in the labor market during the pandemic; (Im)mobility and occupational careers in Mexico; The normative life course model in Mexico: Evidence from gender inequality among a cohort of older adults; Confinement risks and social inequalities in Latin America: Evidence from Argentina; Dossier: New uncertainties in the world of work, Acta Sociológica; Grasping uncertainties: Risk and subjectivity in the world of work; Intragenerational social mobility and gender inequalities in Mexico.
Alberto Carrera works in Coordinación de Humanidades, where he is responsible for special projects and university chairs. He has also served as Deputy Director for the Dissemination of Humanities and Social Sciences, and as Head of Outreach and Press for UNAM’s University Program for City Studies. He has taught in the Communication Sciences undergraduate program and the Master’s program in Design, Information, and Communication (MADIC) at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Cuajimalpa campus). He also taught research-related courses in the Communication undergraduate program at Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City). He is currently a professor in the Master’s program in International Affairs at Universidad Anáhuac México Norte.
Universidad de Campinas
Dr. Filomena Sandalo, Universidad de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil