Martha Aparicio Rojas | holds a law degree from the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez Oaxaca and she is an associate at the Women Studies Group Rosario Castellanos, a thirty-year-old multi-service organization serving women in the state of Oaxaca. She is also an associate of the Fondo Guadalupe Musalem, where she has assisted indigenous women from Oaxaca state sot that they can obtain their undergraduate degree. Her collaboration with civil organizations and NGO is extensive, and includes but is not limited to Public Health Services, the Office for the Protection of Minors, Women, and Families (DIF), and Oaxaca’s State Department. She joined the Oaxaca Program in 2015 but supervised one of our first interns in 2005. She has extensive background and experience in issues of contemporary Oaxacan society, group work, facilitation and supervision.
Arnulfo Aquino | is a graphic artist and teacher. He received an MA in Visual Arts from the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of the National Autonomous University of Mexico., From 1974-2004, he was a professor at the School of Design of the National Institute of Fine Arts or EDINBA, where he developed their Master’s Degree and their School for Continued Education. He has held over twenty two exhibitions of his own graphic art and participated in over five-hundred national and international exhibitions. His primary medium is politically themed poster art.
Omar Castellanos Lemus | specializes in Spanish as a Second Language and Heritage Language, Hispanic Literature, Mexican Culture and History, and Mexican Film. He has worked at ICO since 2004, where he teaches international students, mainly from the USA, who visit Oaxaca as part of their study away programs at University of Chicago, Pacific Lutheran University, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Montana, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, Bard College, Indiana University South Bend, and more. He holds certificates from the Instituto Cervantes and the Spanish Government, and is a professor examiner for the Diploma en Lenguas Extranjeras (DELE).
Jorge Hernández | received a Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut and has a distinguished record of publication in anthropology of the Oaxaca region. Most recently, he received a coveted Guggenheim fellowship to pursue research focusing on the issue of inclusion and exclusion in the adoption of the 1994 ‘Ley de Derechos y Costumbres’ in the State of Oaxaca.
Herman Luis Martínez Cruz | holds a B.A. in Psychology and is a Spanish as a Second Language instructor. At ICO, he teaches Spanish, Spanish for Medicine Students, and Spanish courses online.
Gloria Molina Gaytán | is in the process of completing her PhD in Neotropical Biodiversity, Conservation, and Natural Resources Management at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional-CIIDIR, Oaxaca). Her doctoral thesis focuses on the measurement of water quality through the monitoring of macroinvertebrates in the Atoyac River, which includes the training and participation of citizen scientists in several key communities along the river’s edge. She has experience as an instructor both in the classroom and in the field (USAID-TIES, CONACYT, TESIS IPN, PEBES and BEIFI) and is a co-author of a major grant for the design of a curriculum to build capacity and knowledge in Oaxaca rural communities regarding best practices for sustainability. He passion for teaching at the University level has led her to teach courses on Research and Methods, Sustainable Development, Natural Resources Management, Ethnobiology, among many others.
Marycarmen Olivares López | holds a B.A. in Communication form the Universidad Mesoamericana and has been teaching Spanish as a Second Language at ICO since 2013. Her students hail from Pacific Lutheran University, Stevens Point, Montanna, Virginia, Kenesaew, Dallas, and more.
Francisco Ruiz Cervantes | is a Professor of History in the School of Humanities of the Universidad Autónoma de Oaxaca. He is a prolific scholar whose focus has been on the history of education in Mexico, generally, and in Oaxaca, specifically.
Daniela Traffano | received a B.A. in Political Science from the Universitá degli Studi di Torino and PhDs in History from the Centro de Estudios Históricos at El Colegio de México and the University of Genoa, Italy. Her questions about ethnohistory found their answer in Oaxaca, where she worked on the recovery and organization of the Historic Archive of the Archdiocese. In 2001, she published her study of the relationship between indigenous communities, the state, and the church in the nineteenth century, Indios, curas, y nación. La sociedad indígena frente a un proceso de secularización: Oaxaca, siglo XIX. She is a teacher-scholar at CIESAS Unidad Pacífico Sur, where she is doing research on nineteenth-century liberalism and education in the state of Oaxaca. She also teaches for the M.A. programs in history, CIESAS Peninsular (Mérdida, Yucatán) and Social Anthropology, CIESAS Pacífico Sur (Oaxaca, Oaxaca). Her publications focus on the history of education in nineteenth-century Oaxaca; political catechisms; education, city councils, and citizenship; and primary sources for the study of the elementary school system at the state level.
Tamara R. Williams | Director Oaxaca Program | is a Professor of Hispanic Studies with expertise in the Latin American region. Before assuming the role of Executive Director of the Wang Center, she taught Spanish Language at many levels as well as courses focused on Latin American literatures and cultures. She is the author of several articles on Latin American poetry and project coordinator of the bilingual edition of Ernesto Cardenal’s El estrecho dudoso/The Doubtful Strait published by Indiana University Press. Her current research interests focus on masculinities as they relate to the recovery of lyrical subjectivities in contemporary Mexican poetry and fiction. She pioneered PLU’s first J-term Study Away Spanish immersion course in Costa Rica (now offered in Uruguay) and is co-founder, with Professor John Lear (UPS) of PLU’s Fall Semester Program in Oaxaca, Mexico. At PLU, she has been a tireless advocate for global education.
Adela Ramos | is this semester’s on-site Director of the PLU/UPS Fall Semester Program in Oaxaca. She is a Mexican and American Associate Professor of English and specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and critical animal studies. A native of Mexico City or “Chilanga,” she holds a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and a Diplome in Translation Studies from El Colegio de México. Her main area of research focuses on how interspecies relationships model self-stranger relationships in eighteenth-century British literature, and she also investigates human and non-human relationships in Latin American literature. Her forthcoming article on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman will be published in TULSA Studies in Women’s Literature (Spring 2018) and her work on the hunting of the hare in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is forthcoming in Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (Routledge, 2017). |