Dr. Beaudrie is an Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the School of International Letters & Cultures at Arizona State University, where she directs the Spanish Heritage Program. She also teaches Spanish language program administration, bilingualism, and heritage language pedagogy & research in the PhD Program in Spanish linguistics. She received her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition Teaching with a minor in Spanish linguistics from the University of Arizona. Her research interests include classroom instruction, language program development, critical approaches to heritage pedagogy and heritage language assessment and literacy development. She is the co-editor of Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: The State of the Field, published by Georgetown University Press in 2012 and co-author of Heritage language pedagogy: Research and practice with McGraw-Hill (2014). Her latest book is Innovative strategies for heritage language teaching: A practical guide for the classroom, a co-edited volume with GUP (2016).
Lourdes Torres is a Professor and Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. She is editor of the journal, Latino Studies. She is the author of Puerto Rican Discourse and co-editor of Tortilleras: Hispanic and Latina Lesbian Expression and Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Her recent essays on language and culture have appeared in Meridians, MELUS, Centro Journal, and International Journal of Bilingualism. Torres is working on a long-term project in Spanish sociolinguistics that will offer a comparative analysis of Spanish language use in Latino communities in Chicago (Mexican, Puerto Rican and MexiRican). This study, a collaborative project, will offer insight into the evolution of Spanish dialects in a contact situation.
Christine Shea is an Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Iowa. Her research examines how groups of bilinguals perceive and produce their different languages. In particular, Dr. Shea has investigated how the relationship between dominance and proficiency affects the phonetic realization of vowels in Spanish heritage speakers.