About Us

Our Vision

With our roots in Colorado’s multilingual communities and a global perspective, we strive to illuminate human experience through critical inquiry, creativity, and intercultural understanding to create a more just, open, and connected world. We envision a department where research and teaching highlight the centrality of Spanish and Portuguese to Colorado, the United States, the Americas, the Caribbean, Portugal, and Spain, underscoring how language and culture can be transformative vehicles for shaping and driving student careers.

Our Mission

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese advances knowledge of human thought, culture, and language through rigorous research, innovative thinking, and public engagement. Through a flexible and coherent set of courses from Latin American Studies, Latinx Studies, Iberian Studies, and Hispanic Linguistics, we empower graduates to think critically, communicate effectively, and apply social science and humanistic perspectives to the challenges of a complex and changing world. Our programs and credentials are complemented by applied, high-impact experiences in the classroom. These include portfolio design, creative projects, and research analysis. Outside the classroom, we offer credit-bearing internships, community-engaged learning, and study abroad opportunities. These opportunities allow students to acquire a solid disciplinary foundation while tailoring their path of professional specialization. By maintaining close ties with our graduates to benefit from their experiences, we are preparing the next generation of multilingual students for meaningful professional opportunities in Colorado, the US, and beyond.

Our Core Dimensions

• Research Excellence – Sustained engagement with literary, artistic, linguistic, and cultural inquiry across the Spanish and Portuguese-Speaking Worlds.
• Professional Formation – Development of transcultural communication, translation, interpretation, and analytical skills that support diverse career paths.
• Critical & Creative Inquiry – Integration of interpretive, analytical, and expressive methods that foster innovation.
• Curricular Coherence – Bridging language learning with intercultural expertise via micro-credentials, certificates, minors and major programs that support credentialization based on rich coursework and experiential opportunities locally and globally.
• Public Humanities –Collaborative faculty and student analog and digital projects that engage academic work with broader communities in and beyond Colorado.
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration – Partnerships linking our teaching and research to the arts, social sciences, other humanistic fields, and professional schools.

Our tenured and tenure-track faculty members are Esther Brown, Peter Elmore, John Kennedy Godoy, Javier Krauel, Tania Martuscelli, Élika Ortega-Guzmán, Andrés Prieto, Tracy Quan, Javier Rivas and Núria Silleras-Fernández.

Several members of the Spanish & Portuguese Department have been trained as UnDocuAllies. This means we stand with undocumented students, staff, and their families. They have completed a formal training session familiarizing them with issues related to immigrants and immigration, and most importantly they are committed to maintaining confidentiality in all conversations and dealings with undocumented persons. Please contact Shannon Markusen if you need help in any capacity.