Languages & Literatures

I am a scholar of contemporary Spain and a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oklahoma State University. My research studies how people make sense of time and identity through literature, music and film after events that alter collective worldviews. I work across disciplines, combining literature with political and cultural theory, and I pay particular attention to artistic expression in minoritized languages.

I have examined narratives written in exile following the Spanish Civil War, and cultural production—especially fantasy and sci-fi cinema—in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. My current work explores cultural activism and how some peripheral communities in northern Spain reimagine tradition. My research has appeared in journals such as  Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, MLN, Catalan Review, Lletres Asturianes, and Linguistic Minorities in Europe Online. I am the co-editor of the book Asturian Studies in the 21st century, and have two forthcoming edited collections on Asturian women writers and migration. My work has been supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education (Hispanex) and by Oklahoma State University, among others.

I serve as President of Asturian Studies / SAnTINA, an international research network that promotes scholarship on Asturias. I organized the network’s second international conference at OSU in 2023. I'm also part of the Modern Language Association liaison group within ALCESXXI (Asociación de Literatura y Cine Español Siglo XXI), and I serve on the scientific committees of ARLAS (Archivu de la Represión Llingüística del Asturianu) and the Textos UEx collection at the Universidad de Extremadura. I co-edit the Asturiana Studies book series at De Gruyter. As co-founder and coordinator of Voces y versos-Tulsa, I promote Spanish-language poetry and music performances in the local community.

Before arriving at OSU, I taught at Central Michigan University and at the Univerzitet Džemal Bijedic´ in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I earned my PhD in Hispanic Cultural Studies from Michigan State University, and my BA and MA in Hispanic Philology from the Universidá d’Uviéu in Spain.

In addition to my academic work, I translate and write creatively in Spanish, English, and Asturian. I bring this multilingual and multicultural approach to my teaching, where I aim to engage students with the richness and complexity of Iberian languages and cultures.

Research Interests:

Literature, film and music in contemporary Iberian cultures (Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Asturian). Exile studies. Memory studies. Studies of the future. Minoritized Languages. Asturian Studies.

Dr. Claudia Cavallin is a Professor at the Department of Languages and Literatures at Oklahoma State University. She holds a degree in Social Communication focusing on Humanistic Development, a Magister Scientiae in Latin American and Caribbean Literature, and a Ph.D. in Spanish. 

She was a professor at the University of Los Andes and the Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela. She has also been a professor at the University of Salamanca in Spain. She mentored and guided more than ten undergraduate and two graduate students. Dr. Cavallin was the director of the academic journal Estudios. Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela). She continues her investigation of literature and migration, which define the production and dissemination of contemporary translations of Latin American literature.

Dr. Cavallin published the books Ciudades de película: Ficciones urbanas del cine, la literatura y la música (Editorial Académica Española) and Espectros de la palabra. La metáfora en Borges: los juegos del lenguaje que hacen posible la configuración de un universo de imágenes recursivas (Editorial Académica Española).  She has worked tirelessly to promote Latin American voices in a range of print and digital media, including the online magazines World Literature Today, Latin American Literature Today, and Trópico Absoluto, as well as in the Papel Literario of the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, the magazine A Contracorriente, published in New Hampshire, and the magazine Carátula, published in Managua and Madrid. Dr. Cavallin also served as director of digital media for Carátula magazine and held the same position at Latin American Literature Today for several years.

Dr. Cavallin is a translator (English, Spanish, Italian) and she is part of Colaboratorio Ávila.

Colaboratorio Ávila is a translation collective formed by Katie Brown (University of Exeter), Claudia Cavallin (Oklahoma State University), María Gracia Pardo (University of Miami), and Raquel Rivas Rojas (The University of Edinburgh). Their objective is to let the Venezuelan accent and the Latin American viewpoint into every text, to build without betrayal, to accept sudden revelations, and to celebrate the results with laughter that crosses oceans. As a member of Colaboratorio Avila and independently, Dr. Cavallin has translated numerous interviews and recently published essays and poetry.

Between 2021 and 2025, Dr. Cavallin published more than fifty interviews in English and Spanish. A special mention of her interviews was published in the "Section of Venezuela Studies: The latest news, views, and announcements," November 2024 #28 of Latin American Studies Association LASA. Related to her research, she has recently published in the book titled *Key Concepts for Current Venezuelan Literature* (Edicoes Makunaima, 2025), with a chapter called *Imagined Homelands*, where she redefines what it means to be a Venezuelan migrant abroad.

Claudia Cavallin will serve as the Latin American Studies Association Venezuela Chair for the next two years (2026-2028). 

Some of her publications can be found here: https://www.ccavallin.com/

Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature

Please visit my website (link at left) to read my past publications.

Juan Carlos Rozo is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages & Literatures at Oklahoma State. University. He obtained his PhD with a specialization in Latin American Literature at the University of Houston.

His research interestes include Colonial Latin American literature and visual culture, with a focus on the sixteenth and early-seventeenth century, as well as the Amazonian, Andean and Caribbean regions. His approach to this corpus is through geo/ecocritical lense, attentive to the relationship between early colonial cultural production (historiographical, literary, and geographical), and the geographical imagination. Moreover, his research extends to historical fiction, new literary revisions or rewritings of the colonial period, as well as other forms of contemporary literary production of the "Age of Explorations" across Latin America.

Additionally, he is interested in creative writing in Spanish, and has taught numerous workshops at different academic grade levels, and focused on different literary genres and techniques. 

https://hcommons.org/members/giovannisalazarcalvo/

https://okstate.academia.edu/GiovanniSalazarCalvo

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=list_works&hl=en&user=EOQOfMAAAAAJ

Giovanni F. Salazar Calvo is an Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages & Literatures at Oklahoma State University. He obtained his BA in Classical Philology at the University of Costa Rica, his MA in Spanish at Western Michigan University, and his Ph. D in Hispanic Cultural Studies at Michigan State University, under the direction of Dr. Rocío Quispe Agnoli. 

His research interests include Colonial Latin American literatures and cultures, Indigenous worldviews in Mesoamerica and the Andes, non-ordinary states of consciousness, psychoactive plants and ethnobotany, and the intertwining of religion and medicine in the context of medical humanities, among other areas of research.

He focuses on early modern studies, especially the transatlantic circulation of knowledge about medicine and religion, psychoactive plants, and shamanism among other vehicles of non-ordinary states of consciousness in Spain and colonial Mexico. He is intrigued about how native cosmologies and their insights about bodily, mental, and spiritual health appear in colonial literature, such as codices and conquest chronicles, and stays relevant in contemporary Mexican cultural artifacts, especially literature, but also visual art. 

He is currently working on a book manuscript about the portrait of psychoactive phármaka, such as datura, marihuana, peyote cactus, ololiuhqui (morning glory), and psychoactive mushrooms in works written in Spain and Colonial Mexico during the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. He researches how works of natural and moral history intertwine European and Native ideas about health and religion in medical practices. He is interested in observing how these images constitute cultural systems of social organization in which medicine is practiced. This book challenges the traditional separation between moral and natural discourses by observing the attitude held by priests and doctors towards the phenomenon of inebriation among witches, sorcerers, medicine men, shamans, and Indigenous communities in Spain and New Spain.

He has also written an introduction and a preliminary critical study for Hipernatura: doce cuentos de ecoficción peruana, a collection of short stories written by members of Qhipa Pacha, a collective of Peruvian authors that are concerned with Peruvian futurism and ecofiction. In this work, he reflects on the role of human beings in a sustainable ecosystem in which plants engage in a symbiotic relationship with humans to generate peace. 

Additionally, he is the Assistant Editor/Production of the Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades (REGS)/Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies (JGSS).  He has also conducted archival research at the National Archive of the Nation, and at the National Library in Mexico City. 

Research Interests:

Colonial Latin American Literatures and Cultures

Mexican Literatures and Cultures

Indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andes

Non-ordinary States of Consciousness

Psychoactive Plants and Ethnobotany

Medical Humanities and Religious Studies

Classical Philology

Spanish as a Second Language

Rebecca Stewart-Gray is assistant professor and head of German in OSU's Department of Languages and Literatures. Prior to joining OSU, Dr. Stewart-Gray was visiting assistant professor of German at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. She has published on Schiller, Kleist, Austrian anti-Napoleonic poet Heinrich Joseph von Collin, and suppressed composer Erwin Schulhoff, and is coeditor of Heinrich von Kleist: Literary and Philosophical Paradigms (Camden House, 2022) alongside Jeffrey L. High and Elaine Chen. She has taught and directed choirs at German immersion summer schools since 2014 and is thrilled to return to Portland State University's Deutsche Sommerschule am Pazifik again this summer to teach courses on German translation and the Zauberoper genre. In addition to her work in German Studies, she works as a musicologist, translator, and event curator affiliated with the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. Points of contact with other programs include her experience in philosophy and Italian.

Nurettin Ucar is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Oklahoma State University. Ucar received his MA in Intercultural Anglophone Studies from Bayreuth University in Germany and completed his PhD at Indiana University in Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies. His dissertation focused on the political, economic, and social changes during the Weimar Republic as they are displayed by Thomas Mann and Hans Fallada in their novels.

His research interests include Modern German literature, culture, and film, the Bildungsroman, European culture and history, interculturality and intertextuality.