Practice your Spanish with the Spanish Club!
Professor Reyes Coll-Tellechea is featured in the University of Cantabría news for her work on “La historia del Lazarillo.”
De la partitura a la escena: La dirección musical en la Zarzuela.
Join our colleagues for the Fall 2025 Speaker Series
Paving the Way to Healthcare Access
From June 6 to 7, the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies co-sponsored and co-hosted the annual Paving the Way to Healthcare Access conference. Professional interpreters came together to learn about the latest training and trends in the field and to raise awareness about the importance of translators and interpreters in providing health services in the languages required by specific community settings. For the second year, the department partnered with Paving the Way, an organization that has provided training to medical interpreters for years. This partnership helps our multilingual students find professional connections and engage them in helping their communities in this critical area of care.
LAIS professors Mansilla & Castro-Ramírez speak at NETA (New England Translators Association)
On May 3, translation students and Professors Diego Mansilla and Nayelli Castro-Ramírez participated in the academic section of the 2025 New England Translators Association (NETA) conference. Professor María Cisterna, chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies, gave the opening remarks. Since 2016, the Department has proudly supported the New England translators’ community, encouraging student and faculty participation in this important professional gathering and raising awareness of the significance of translation in contemporary societies.
Undergraduate Research Showcase features LAIS students
On April 30, under the supervision of Prof. Nayelli Castro-Ramírez, translation students presented their research posters at the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) Undergraduate Research Showcase. Their posters reflected on the multidimensional nature of translation, covering topics such as translation and performing arts (Sabrina Femino), oral history (Candace Chan), poetry (Amira Lucas), news (Henry Needham), audiovisual media (Nina Ávila), Latin American politics (Ishaiah Alvarenga), and social justice (Vivienne Auguste). The CLA jury recognized their good work, awarding Candace Chan first place in the competition and giving honorable mentions to Amira Lucas, Henry Needham, and Ishaiah Alvarenga.
Paving the Way to Health Care Access
Professor Nayelli Castro participates in a translation conference
Professor Isabel Gomez receives award!
Professor Gomez’s book Cannibal Translation received an Honorable Mention for the MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures.
The selection committee citation, pasted below, describes her work with an interesting take on its timeliness.
“Isabel C. Gómez’s Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America theorizes original concepts of interpretation and translation, articulating precisely how literary interpretation manifests skill, creativity, and art. It poses keen questions about cultural reciprocity and the productive nonassimilation of texts. At a moment when some sociocultural forces seem all too prepared to allow artificial intelligence to define the act of rendering or rerendering text, Gómez makes clear the importance of craft, personal will, and politics for the elaboration of authentic interpretive literary work. Gómez’s study is a confident, innovative dive into the act and field of translation as a rapacious, re-creative endeavor. Building on well-established Latin American articulations of anthropophagia and translation, Gómez’s framework blends intellectual, aesthetic, and literary histories with practice. With particular attention to translations emerging from the Americas, Gómez thoughtfully engages with contemporary preoccupations about the roles of transmission, content generators, cultural legitimacy, and the metaphorical hunger that drives the creation and exchange of culture.” (Citation from MLA selection committee).
