Faculty
Program Director
Professor Pedro Lange Churión is both an academic and a visual artist. He has written and directed various films, including Crocodile (USA, 2000). Based on a short story by Felisberto Hernández. This film received a Remmy Bronze award for best dramatic adaptation at the Houston International Film Festival (2001). He also wrote and directed Visitas (Colombia, 2005), a full-feature narrative film that explores violence in Colombia. This film has garnered recognition as "Official Selection" in...
Full-Time Faculty
Associate Professor, received her Masters in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University and her PhD from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Stanford University. Her areas of focus include Mexican, Border and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Studies, with an interest in Feminist and Performance Studies.
- MA, Comparative Literature, San Francisco State University
- PhD, Department of Spanish and Portugese, Stanford University
Prof. Olmedo general area of expertise is Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research interests focus on Gothic Literature, Women and Gender Studies, and Emergent Horror Cinemas. She teaches courses in language and culture and also literature and film, such as: Feminist Theory and Feminist Discourse, The Revenge of the Monsters and Conflicts and Confluences in the Spanish speaking world. She is the curator of the Latin Horror Film Festival at USF.
- PhD, Hispanic Studies, University of Kentucky
- BA, Profesorado en Letras, Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia (Argentina)
- Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies
Karyn Schell received her PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Washington. She also serves as the Spanish Language Coordinator. Her areas of interest include Second Language Acquisition, Foreign Language Teaching Pedagogy, and Theoretical Linguistics. She teaches Spanish language and culture, Spanish conversation, and service-learning.
- PhD, Romance Linguistics, University of Washington
Prof. Urrutia-Jordana earned her BA in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA and PhD in Spanish Literature at Stanford University (1996). She has taught at the University of San Francisco since 1996 and has been a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain.
Her first book, La poetización de la política en el Unamuno exiliado: De Fuerteventura a París Romancero del destierro, was published in 2003 by Ediciones Universidad de...
- PhD and MA, Spanish Literature, Stanford University (1996)
- BA, Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
Rakhel has published articles and book chapters in Hispania, Crítica Hispánica, Revista Iberoamericana de Lingüística, Teatro: revista de estudios culturales and Palgrave MacMillan on twentieth-century Spanish Theater, Hispanic Linguistics, Comic and Tragic discourses, as well as on Gender and Social Mediation. Her latest publication is the co-edited volume, Manifestaciones de lo trágico en la cultura moderna peninsular, published on The Hispanic Issues Online (2020), where she focuses on the...
- PhD in Romance Languages and Literature, University of California, Berkeley
- MA in Pedagogy of Spanish as a Second Language, University of Salamanca
- BA in Hispanic Philology, University of Deusto ...
Part-Time Faculty
Prof. Cortes-Bodero was born, raised, and mainly educated in the country of Mexico. She received a BA in Spanish from Escuela Normal Superior de Jalisco, and a BA in Business Administration from the University of Valle Atemajac. After spending a few years teaching Spanish in Mexico, she moved to California where she attended Long Beach State University and received a MA in Spanish with an emphasis in Latin American Literature. She has been teaching Spanish at USF since 2001.
- MA, Spanish with an emphasis in Latin American Literature, Long Beach State University
- BA, Business Administration, University of Valle Atemajac
- BA, Spanish, Escuela Normal Superior de Jalisco
- MA in Linguistics from San Francisco State University
- BA in Spanish from San Francisco State University
Prof. Shannon Raintree was raised in San Francisco and Hawaii. She has lived, studied, and traveled extensively in Latin America and the Basque Country.
- MA, TESOL, San Francisco State University
- BA, Spanish, San Francisco State University
Virginia Ramos is a Spanish and American poet, and scholar. She earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and is the former Managing Editor of Mantis, A Journal of Poetry, Criticism and Translation. Her essays, poems and reviews have appeared in several publications in the US and Europe. Earlier in her career she worked for the Global Fund for Women and continues to support and fight for human rights globally. Her overall research interest centers on multi-genre texts...
- Stanford University, PhD in Comparative Literature, 2016
- San Francisco State University, MA in Humanities, 2008
- Modern and Contemporary Literature (Spanish, French, German, and English)
- Poetry and Lyrical narratives
- Interdisciplinary Studies
- Transnational and Postcolonial Studies
Mark Salfi earned his MA in Comparative Literature at UC San Diego, combining interests in Spanish, English, Italian, film, and cultural studies. During and after his graduate career, he taught in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Literature at UCSD. Salfi has been working as an adjunct professor at USF since 1997. He received the Distinguished Adjunct Teaching Award in 2012 and the Innovations in Instruction Award in 2014.
- MA, Comparative Literature, UC San Diego
Faculty Emeritus
Associate Professor, received her PhD in Romance Philology from the University of California at Berkeley. Her current research centers on medieval Iberian texts and manuscripts, in particular the 13th century Cantigas de Santa Maria. She is part of the BITAGAP (Bibliografía de Textos Antigos Portugueses e Galegos) database team as well.