Esther María Alarcón Arana, Ph.D.
Esther María Alarcón Arana, Ph.D.
Associate Professor | Modern Languages
Dr. Esther María Alarcón Arana received her M.A. in English (2001), and both her M.A. (2010) and Ph.D. (2015) in Hispanic studies from the University of Pennsylvania. While she is interested in Transatlantic Cultural Studies, her main focus is Spain, whose artistic production she studies from a feminist and antiracist perspective. In addition to teaching at Salve Regina, she serves as secretary in the Asociación Hispánica de Humanidades. Her recent publications include two edited volumes, Muerte y crisis en el mundo hispano (Peter Lang, 2020) and El reflejo de Medusa: Representaciones mediáticas contemporáneas de las mujeres (Advook, 2023); “Mafalda’s Music: Care Against the Patriarchal Culture of Romantic Love” in Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades (2023); and “Using the Web to Educate Spain About Its Afro-Identity: Afroféminas” in Colonialist Gazes and Counternarratives of Blackness. Afro-Spanishness in 20th and 21st Centuries (Routledge, 2024). She is currently working on a book studying how feminism and affect intersect in the creation of a conscious culture through contemporary Spanish music.
Emily Colbert Cairns, Ph.D.
Emily Colbert Cairns, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chair | Modern Languages
Associate Professor | Cultural, Environmental, and Global Studies
Dr. Emily Colbert Cairns specializes in gender, converso and crypto-Jewish identity in the early modern period in the Spanish-speaking world, and has published with eHumanista, Chasqui, Cervantes Journal and Hispanófila. Her dissertation, “The Other Sephardic Diaspora: Feminine Representations of Sephardic Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” deals with the role that women had in preserving and representing Sephardic traditions in a transatlantic context. She is the co-editor of Confined Women: The Walls of Female Space in Early Modern Spain (Hispanic Issues Online, 2020) and the author of Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas (Palgrave 2017).
During her graduate studies at the University of California Irvine, she founded and ran a language exchange program that brought together university students learning Spanish with the local Spanish-speaking community.
Dean de la Motte, Ph.D.
Dean de la Motte, Ph.D.
Professor | Modern Languages
A California native, Dean de la Motte has degrees in comparative literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; he studied French and German at the Université de Poitiers (France) and the Deutsche Schule of Middlebury College (Vermont), respectively.
The co-editor of Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (with Jeannene Przyblyski) and Approaches to Teaching Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” (with Stirling Haig), he has published a wide range of articles on nineteenth-century French literature and culture and numerous essays on the teaching of literature.
From 2000 to 2014 he worked as a chief academic officer, including eight years as the provost of Salve Regina University. He now teaches courses in French and English, including an annual seminar entitled “Scribblemania: The Brontës and the Passion of Writing.” In the fall of 2021, he was a visiting scholar in Lyon, France. Oblivion is his first novel.
James G. Mitchell, Ph.D.
James G. Mitchell, Ph.D.
Professor | Modern Languages
James G. Mitchell, Ph.D. graduated from Goucher College (Towson, MD) in 1996 with degrees in biochemistry and French. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Romance Studies with a specialization in Second Language Acquisition from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) in 2001. Since 2001, he has been employed as a professor at a variety of institutions from large state universities to small liberal arts colleges. Since 2006, he has been at Salve Regina University where he is currently Professor of French, Italian, and Linguistics. His overarching research specialization is second language acquisition, specifically aspects of classroom acquisition and second language pedagogy.