Dr. Cristopher Font Santiago is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His teaching and research interests include English linguistics, English as a second language, the contemporary role of bilingualism in language acquisition in Puerto Rico, language contact, language change, perceptual dialectology, sociophonetics, natural language processing, and phonology. Furthermore, his research agenda ranges from an exploration of the mechanisms behind the diachronic development of English to, most recently and in collaboration with researchers from multiple disciplines, efforts towards the expansion of an interdisciplinary institutional research program in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence learning. Cristopher holds a Ph.D. in English Language and Linguistics (2021) with a minor in Spanish Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jocelyn A. Géliga Vargas is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez Campus, where she also regularly teaches in the Master of Arts in Cultural and Humanistic Studies of the Department of Humanities and has taught in the Sociology program of the Department of Social Sciences, the Comparative Literature program of the Department of Humanities and the intersdisciplinary Film Certificate program. Since 2016 she also serves as co-coordinator of the Center for University Access, an educational justice project aimed at public school students aspiring to become first generation college students. Prior to her UPRM appointment, Dr. Géliga Vargas held a research and teaching position at the Institute of Human Development at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento in Buenos Aires and adjuncted in the English and Cultural Studies program of Lincoln University-Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She also held a joint Assistant Professor appointment in the Media Studies program of the Department of Speech and Drama and in the Multilingual Journalism Program of the Department of Languages and Literatures at Lehman College-CUNY. She has published book chapters, peer reviewed journals and columns on Afro-Puerto Rican oral history, the characterization of Afro-Puerto Ricans and Afro-Caribbean history in national cinema, the representation of Puerto Rican women in Hollywood cinema, the digital divide and the complexity of “access” to new technologies, feminist ethnography, queer pedagogies, and participatory/collaborative research methods. With funding from the Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades, she is currently editing an anthology of creative non-fiction pieces written by underserved Puerto Rican youth reflecting upon their experiencies with recent natural and human-manufactured disasters. She serves on the Education Subcomittee of the y la Desigualdad Social en Puerto Rico and is on the Board of Directors of Comisión para Combatir la Pobreza Infantil the Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades. Starting August, 2024 she will serve as Co-Principal Investigator of the Programa de Estudios en Afrodescendencia y Racialidad of the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.

 


Sandra L. Soto Santiago is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She has a B.A. in English Literature and a M.A. in English Education from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She completed her PhD in Language, Reading and Culture at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2014. Dr. Soto Santiago teaches ESL courses as well as graduate and undergraduate courses in Applied Linguistics, Language Acquisition and Research Methods. She is currently the Co-coordinator of the Centro Universitario para el Acceso (CUA) and Co-director of the Centro para la Investigación del Bilingüismo y Aprendizaje (CeIBA). Her main research interests are in Social and Educational Justice, Linguistic Anthropology, Puerto Rican Migration and Transnationalism, Second Language Acquisition, and Translanguaging.

Dr. Gregory Stephens

Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, where he has taught since 2014. His book “Three Birds Sing a New Song: A Puerto Rican trilogy about Dystopia, Precarity, and Resistance” was published by Intermezzo (2019). He is the author of On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (Cambridge UP).

Stephens’ work at UPRM has centered on ethnographic writing featuring student voices. See “Decolonial refusals: Ethnographic writing from the postperiphery,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly (Fall 2024).

His PhD is in Communication, University of California-San Diego. Publications elaborating the theory of communicative cultures include: § “Postcolonialism as Leftist Firing Squad and Procrustean Bed: A Communicative Take.” Journal for Cultural Research (Spring 2023). § “Halfies, Half-Written Letters, and One-Eyed Gods: Connecting the Dots of Communicative Cultures.” Dialogue: The interdisciplinary journal of popular culture & pedagogy 8:3 (2021-22). His fifteen years in the Caribbean includes four years as Lecturer of Cultural Studies and Film at the University of the West Indies-Mona. A transnational, communicative approach informs his work on Latin American and the Caribbean, as in the chapter “Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn.”