Dr. María-Isabel Martínez-Mira

Associate Professor of Spanish

María-Isabel Martínez-Mira received her BA in English Philology from the Univer­sity of Murcia in Murcia, Spain. She earned her M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics and her Ph.D. and a SLATE (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education) certifi­ca­tion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her teaching/research areas in­clude English-Spanish bilingualism, sociolinguistics/Spanish variation, teaching of Spanish for heritage speakers, and languages in contact. Her research on Spanish has been published in journals such as “Spanish in Context,” “Sociolinguistic Studies” and “Studies in His­panic and Lusophone Linguistics,” among other journals. At UMW she has taught courses on Spanish phonetics, Language and Identity, Spanish in the US, Spanish for Medical Purposes, Latinx Discrimination in the US and History of Latinos in the US. She conducts research on the relation between language, ethnicity and identity within the U.S. Hispanic community and also on the analysis of 16th century female testaments from the city of Murcia (Spain) within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework.

Teaching

“Language Rights In the Wake of COVID-19” on June 3, 2021