Faculty

Pablo G. Celis-Castillo was born in the Northern Andes of Peru in the mid-eighties. Originally trained as a filmmaker, he received his PhD in Latin American literary and cultural studies at the University of Kansas in 2014. He is interested in Peruvian visual culture and in performance theory. He is also interested in Latin American literature from the 19th to the 21st centuries, film studies, and in technology-based approaches to language teaching. His current scholarly work discusses how cultural expressions reflect upon the armed conflict that Peru endured during the 1980s and 1990s. He is particularly interested in analyzing how the psychological consequences of the political violence are portrayed in fictional narratives associated with the conflict.

Mayte de Lama is from Vigo, Spain, where she earned a B.A. in Education. Teaching has been one of her passions for many years. She began her career in education teaching English to Spanish children in elementary and middle school for almost a year. Then, she was presented with the opportunity to attend graduate school in the U.S. when she received a teaching assistantship from the University of Kentucky. She earned her doctorate degree in Hispanic Studies in 2003, and that same year she accepted an Assistant Professor position at Elon University. Her research interests include Spanish women writers, humor and eroticism in literature, and immigration in contemporary Spanish films, among others. Mayte has led summer and semester programs in Spain and Costa Rica and she is fond of learning and researching other cultures. She enjoys working out, reading, watching international films, hiking, and spending time with family and friends. She loves going back home in the summer and looks forward to enjoying the beach, tasty fresh bread, the breeze of summers in Galicia, travelling, and reconnecting with her family and friends overseas. Have you ever travelled to Spain? If you have been to this beautiful country, you can understand why Mayte returns there every summer.

Born in Málaga, Spain, Mina García earned her Bachelor’s degree in English Philology from the Universidad de Málaga.  After completing her undergraduate degree, she continued as a student at the Universidad de Málaga, pursuing doctoral studies in Spanish Philology.  While working on her Spanish dissertation and teaching Spanish language at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA, she realized a growing interest in Trans-Atlantic Studies, and began a second Ph.D. program in the Romance Studies Department at Duke. She holds two Ph.D. degrees: one in Spanish Language and Literature, with an emphasis in Early Modern Literature, from Universidad de Málaga, Spain; and a second one from Duke University with concentration on transatlantic studies during the colonial period in Latin-America. Dr. García’s research interests include the role of literature in the expansion of the Spanish empire, Early Modern Spanish literature, transatlantic studies and Latin American colonial culture and literature with special attention to the role of the Other: conversos, moriscos, and witches. She has authored multiple article and book chapters as well as numerous conference papers. Her first book, entitled Magia, Hechicería y Brujería: Entre La Celestina y Cervantes was published by Editorial Renacimiento (Seville, Spain) in 2010. Her second book, Idolatry and the Construction of the Spanish Empire was published by University of Colorado Press in 2018. Her third book, published in 2021 by the University of Toronto Press, is a collection of original essays and interviews that focuses on the many ways in which early modern Spanish plays engaged their audiences in a dialogue about abuse, injustice, and inequality. 

Ketevan Kupatadze received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Spanish-American literature from Emory University and joined Elon faculty in 2007. Her teaching and research interests include contemporary, post-Boom Spanish-American narrative and the intersections of literature, identity, and socio-political discourses. Her disciplinary recent research examines the possibilities of rethinking cosmopolitan tradition through its relationship with the practice of hospitality from a Spanish-American perspective, particularly in the works by Manuel Puig, Rodrigo Fresán, and Ignacio Padilla.

Ketevan is also actively involved in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Her most recent projects include the flipped classroom pedagogy and the discussion-based, collaborative approaches to teaching a foreign language. She has led planning and implementation of new Spanish curriculum at Elon University’s Department of World Languages and Cultures, which focuses on the development of students’ intercultural competence and critical thinking abilities, in combination with the advancement of their linguistic competence. She has also co-led the department’s efforts to integrate meaningful writing assignments throughout the language curriculum as part of the University’s Writing Excellence Initiative.

Juan Leal-Ugalde is a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) at the University of Michigan. He defended a dissertation entitled The Enigma of Time and History: Images of Death in Revolutions and Armed Conflicts of the Twentieth Century in Mexico and Central America. Connecting photography and literature, his dissertation analyzes the historical violence of modern revolutions and their political and social consequences in present times. Juan Leal-Ugalde has a background in Continental philosophy, particularly aesthetics and critical theory. His research also includes Chilean poetry, Andean photography, Latin American visual culture, and films. He participated in multidisciplinary projects on indigenous photography in Chile, such as the publication of the books Andinos: Visualidades e imaginarios del desierto y el altiplano, y Memoria visual e imaginarios: Fotografías de pueblos originarios de los siglos XIX -XXI.  Among his teaching activities, he has taught classes on Latin American and Spanish literature, art, film, and photography, focusing on the representation of crucial historical events such as the Mexican Revolution, the Central American civil wars, and the Southern Cone dictatorships, among others.

Born and raised in Chicago speaking Catalan, English, and Spanish (usually all three languages in one sentence), she venured north to Minnesota to go to St. Olaf College.  She was originally pre-veterinary and took all the required science courses, but her "freebie" courses were in literature and Spanish, which is how she ended up with Spanish and Education majors.  She student-taught in an inner city school in Chicago and stayed afterwards to teach high school Spanish, bilingual biology and bilingual math in the Chicago public school system.  After a few years she decided she needed to figure out how to teach more effectively so she went back to school, this time to Indiana University for a MA.  She had so much fun teaching college students she stayed to get her Ph.D.  When doubting her capabilities to write a dissertation, let alone find a topic, her favorite professor told her, "Pick a topic you love and then figure out how to study it" so she investigated food imagery in contemporary Spanish, Argentine, and Chilean drama (who doesn't like food, right?!).  She was Visiting Professor for a year at the University of Iowa teaching Spanish theatre courses and finishing her dissertation.  Her first tenure-track job was at Grand Valley State University in MI and while the department fit her, the institution didn't so she applied for jobs at small liberal arts institutions that would get her closer to her St. Olaf experience.  They offered her the job at Elon University in 2008 and she, along with her husband, Paul, and (then) infant daughter, Samira, eagerly moved to North Carolina.  A year later she had her son, Kai, and in Spring 2012 she ventured farther south to Costa Rica, with two small children and twenty college students in tow, to lead the Elon Centre in San José program.  In 2013 she happily received tenure at Elon and in 2014 became the Arts & Humanities Director for the Elon College Fellows.  For three years she co-led with Amanda Sturgill a multi-institutional SoTL research seminar on how to better integrate global learning/study away into the entire collegiate experience.  As a result of that experience she decided she, too, wanted to do a multi-institutional SoTL research project and is currently working on one with colleagues at Tulane and CIEE. She teaches a wide variety of courses including Spanish, gender studies, food studies,  Honor's seminars, etc. In Spring 2019 she headed to London to lead the Elon Centre program there, and now she's back on campus teaching and writing about Spanish literature, food, and identity.  In 2021 she became full professor. As Faculty-in-Residence and then Faculty Director for Colonnades, she lives on campus with her family.

Besides spending time trying to plan great courses and classes, improving her teaching, writing articles, and reading anything she can get her hands on, she enjoys creating memories with her kids, having deep "big picture" conversations with her friends and family, going on hikes, cooking, yoga-ing, and traveling as much as possible. 

Federico Pous received his PhD in Spanish from the University of Michigan in 2014 and joined Elon that same year. His teaching and research focus on contemporary Latin American cultural and political dilemmas such as the politics of memory, human rights, and contemporary social movements. His background in sociology, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics allows him to posit questions regarding the historical relationship between culture and politics and its influence on the constitution of subjectivities throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain.

His book, Eventos carcelarios: Imaginario revolucionario y subjetivación política en América Latina (UNC Press 2022), is the result of a comparative research about the experience of political prisoners during the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. Also, he has co-edited a collective volume, Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay (Palgrave Macmillian 2017), about Paraguayan cultural history and the status of democracy in this country as a reflection of post-dictatorship societies in Latin America.

In his teaching, he cultivates discussion-based dynamics that encourage critical thinking, cultural reflections, and political questions about the functions of the DEI paradigm. Since Fall 2017, he has been the coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Minor and has organized different cultural events such as workshops, panels, and film series related to human rights and social justice issues.

Profe Elena is an Associate Professor in World Languages and Cultures and has taught Spanish at Elon since 2012. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from Indiana University and a Master's degree from Middlebury College. Her research interests and publications focus on Second Language Acquisition and its intersection with foreign accent, dialect perception and production, and sociophonetics, with a special interest in how research can inform language pedagogy.She teaches all levels of Spanish, but especially enjoys offering Spanish linguistics classes at the 300 and 400 levels, and mentoring student research related to linguistics. Profe Elena has presented her research at local, national, and international conferences and published work in a variety of journals specializing in Spanish, Spanish linguistics, and language pedagogy. 

Dr. Bethanny Sudibyo received her Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Iowa and joined the Elon faculty in 2023. Her teaching and research interests include Iberian and Colonial Philippines literature/cultural productions with the focus on imperialism, race, gender, and fashion. She has taught a variety of courses including Spanish language & culture courses, the WLC study abroad sequence, and COR1100. Dr. Sudibyo is also developing Spanish for the Professions within the Spanish Program. She is also involved in Elon's ResLife serving as the Polyglot LLC Co-Advisor.