Aída Martinez-Gomez, John Jay College Research Partner​
Aída Martínez-Gómez is an associate professor and coordinator for the B.A. in Spanish and the Certificate Program in Legal Translation and Interpreting at John Jay College. Her main research interests focus on interpreting in prison settings (including language policy and planning, treatment for foreign incarcerated offenders, and the particularities of bilingual prisoners acting as interpreters), non-professional interpreting and child language brokers, interpreting pedagogy for heritage learners, and interpreting quality assessment. Prof. Martínez-Gómez is certified as a Spanish interpreter by the New York State Unified Court System and as an English Sworn translator and interpreter by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has worked in this capacity for the Spanish Secretary General for Correctional Institutions, the British Ministry of Justice, and several international law firms. She also collaborates pro-bono as an interpreter and interpreter trainer with several non-profit organizations in New York City (New Sanctuary Coalition, Her Justice). She holds a Ph.D. in translation and interpreting studies from the University of Alicante.

María Julia Rossi, John Jay College Research Partner​
María Julia Rossi is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at John Jay College. Her monograph Ficciones de emancipación. Los sirvientes literarios de Silvina Ocampo, Elena Garro y Clarice Lispector (Beatriz Viterbo, 2020) explores representations of domestic servants and the emotional economy of relationships in literary works by these Latin American writers. She has also published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Revista Iberoamericana, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Hispamérica, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, and Variaciones Borges. Her current research project is preliminarily titled “Not So Foreign: Translating Queer Desires in Latin America” and lies at the intersection of queer studies and translation studies. María Julia Rossi obtained her B.A.s at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario and Escuela Nacional de Teatro y Títeres, in Rosario, Argentina, and her Ph.D. and M.A. at the University of Pittsburgh.

Elvira Swender, Project Consultant
Elvira Swender is a specialist in proficiency-based language instruction and assessment, with extensive experience overseeing a number of programs and projects that serve the sole purpose of improving language teaching and testing. Dr. Swender is also a consultant to various U.S. and international educational, private sector, and governmental organizations and agencies. From 1997 to 2016, she served as the Director of Professional Programs at ACTFL. Current areas of research include correlations and concordances among testing scales and frameworks, including the ACTFL Guidelines, the U.S. Government’s Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Scale, the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), and the STANAG 6001 (NATO scale). She holds a degree in foreign language education and a Ph.D. in specialization in second language acquisition, Spanish language and culture, and educational administration from Syracuse University.

Tomonori Nagano, Japanese Consultant
Tomonori Nagano is an associate professor of Japanese and linguistics. His research interests are second language acquisition and Japanese as a heritage language. Dr. Nagano’s articles have been published in various linguistics/applied linguistics journals such as Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, TheModern Language Journal, and Foreign Language Annals (See https://www.t-nagano.com/publications/ [t-nagano.com] for his publication list). He is a recipient of the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) award from the Graduate Center in 2019-2020. He is a certified tester and rater for ACTFL’s OPI and AAPPL (Japanese) and is currently serving as an executive board member for the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) at the MLA. He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in linguistics from the Graduate Center, CUNY and his M.A. in TESOL from New York University.

Maayan Barkan, Japanese Consultant
Maayan Barkan is the director of the Japanese program at Hunter College, where she has been teaching Japanese language courses since 2007. Dr. Barkan’s teaching and research focuses on Japanese language education, teaching and learning design, and pragmatic strategies for language learning. Her most recent publication is The Important Role of Pragmatic Strategies in L2 Japanese Teaching and Learning, published in the proceedings of the 24th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum (PJPF) in 2018, and her most recent presentation is Experimental Design: Methods for Investigating Main-Clause Omission in Japanese and Hebrew, a paper presented at the International Pragmatic Association Conference in Hong Kong in 2019. She holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Daniela Castillo, Research Assistant
Daniela Castillo is a level II Ph.D. student in linguistics at the Graduate Center, CUNY who has been working as a research assistant in the Multilingual Literacy SIFE (Students with Interrupted/Inconsistent Formal Education) Screener developed in the Second Language Acquisition Lab at the Graduate Center. For the past two years, Daniela has been teaching a linguistics course in the English department at Hunter College and also has experience teaching English as a foreign language in Argentina as well as Spanish as a foreign language in the U.S. Her research interests comprise different aspects of bilingualism including speech perception and code-switching. Daniela was the recipient of an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Fellowship in 2017-2018 and currently holds a Provost’s Enhancement Fellowship (2018-2023). Daniela received her B.A. with majors in general linguistics and communication sciences and disorders from Queens College, CUNY.

Aránzazu Borrachero Mendívil, Research Partner
Aránzazu Borrachero Mendívil is a professor at Queensborough Community College (CUNY), and has a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian literatures from the Graduate Center (CUNY). Her areas of interest include critical pedagogy and Spanish cultural and gender studies. She has published numerous articles in the area of ​​feminist literary criticism and two books: a critical and annotated edition of the poetry of 17^th-century writer Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán in collaboration with Karl McLaughlin (Obra poética, Editora Regional de Extremadura, 2010); and a theoretical analysis entitled Ética y estética en la narrativa femenina hispanoamericana contemporánea (Pliegos, 2011). Since 2012, she has been working on a digital platform, Mujer y Memoria, designed to house oral history projects with a gender perspective. The first one, entitled “Madres e hijas de la transición democrática,” documents, through audiovisual recordings and life stories, the experiences of women who became adults and mothers during the Francoist dictatorship. She is currently working on her second Mujer y Memoria project: “Maternidades robadas,” which collects and divulges the testimonies of victims of the “stolen babies” crime in Spain.

María Luisa Parra-Velasco, Project Consultant
María Luisa Parra-Velasco is senior preceptor at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) at Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. in Hispanic linguistics from El Colegio de México. Her work focuses on pedagogy for Spanish as a heritage language, identity theory, and U.S.-Mexico transnational education. She directs the RLL’s Initiative on Teaching Spanish as a Heritage Language, and partners with Harvard Art Museums and non-profit organizations to provide students with transformative learning experiences. Finally, she works closely with Spanish college and high school teachers in the Boston area and in Mexico providing them with professional development to teach Spanish to Latinx students at both sides of the border. In 2019, Parra-Velasco received the Babson University Award Most Innovative Professors for her interdisciplinary, creative and cutting-edge work. Her book Enseñanza del español y juventud Latina was published in 2021 (Editorial Arco Libros).