Professor of Spanish | Graduate Chair Modern Languages & Literatures

Isabel Velázquez (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), is Harold E. Spencer Professor in Modern Languages and Literatures. Her area of research includes sociolinguistic variation, Hispanic linguistics, bilingualism and language acquisition, heritage speaker pedagogy, language contact on the U.S./Mexico border, and the role of language in identity formations of US Latin@s. Her current research focuses on linguistic maintenance and loss among Latinx families in the Midwest. 

Dr. Velázquez is the director of Cartas a la Familia/Family Letters. On the Migration from Jesusita to Jane a digital archive that preserves, digitizes, analyzes and makes public a collection of the correspondence and other personal documents of a Mexican American family that migrated from the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, to the states of Colorado and Nebraska during the first half of the twentieth century. 

Her current Ph.D. students are:

  • Marcus Vinícius Barbosa
  • Luisa Carolina Julio Gómez
  • Elliott Jacobson
  • Josefa Samper Suárez

Publications

Interview

Courses

Graduate

  • SPAN 491/891 Spanish in Contact with Other Languages 
  • SPAN 486/886 Spanish in the US: Variation and Contact
  • SPAN 491/891 Heritage Speaker Pedagogy
  • TEAC 815J Teaching Spanish in the Content Areas

Undergraduate

  • SPAN 304 Advanced Writing
  • SPAN 300A Advanced Writing and Reading for heritage speakers of Spanish

 Ongoing Research

  • Family Letters: Digitization and Analysis of the Personal Correspondence of a Mexican American Family in Western CO and Eastern NE in the First Half of the 20th Century
  • Heritage Speakers in the Midwest Project
  • Patterns of Spanish Maintenance and Loss among Latino Families in Lincoln, NE