Linguistics Seminar Series

Fall 2025

We are thrilled to announce the Linguistics Seminar Series for the Fall 2025 semester. The Linguistics Seminar Series features faculty scholars who are involved in language-related research. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Writing & Language Studies and the Office for Bilingual Integration.

The presentations will be hosted each Tuesday from 12:30-1:45pm in Edinburg (EHABW 1.406), Brownsville (BSABH 2.112A) and via Zoom. We provide pizza and soda for in-person attendees. Check the flyer or contact john.foreman@utrgv.edu for Zoom information.

This semester includes three special guest speakers who will visit the Edinburg campus on Sept. 16, Oct. 7, and Nov. 18!

Please join us this Fall semester as we learn from and with our featured speakers!

Upcoming Events

Sep. 16- Sharing Our Stories: A Journey through Mexican-American Literature and Publishing- Gabriela Baeza Ventura

Sharing Our Stories: A Journey through Mexican-American Literature and Publishing

Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura will visit UTRGV to share the inspiring trajectory of her career—from growing up as a fronteriza in the US-Mexico borderlands to becoming a Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and the newly appointed Director of Arte Público Press, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious publisher of U.S. Hispanic literature. Arte Público Press has been instrumental in publishing foundational voices from South Texas, including Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, and Xavier Garza. During her visit, Dr. Baeza Ventura will highlight the significance of Mexican American literature within the broader landscape of U.S. literary and cultural history and will address the current challenges facing scholars working to preserve and promote Mexican American cultural heritage

Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura is Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and Deputy Director of Arte Público Press, the nation’s leading publisher of U.S. Latino literature. In her role at Arte Público, she oversees the editorial production of numerous publications and has personally translated more than 50 children’s picture books and 12 young adult volumes, significantly expanding access to bilingual and bicultural literature. She is also the co-founder and co-director, alongside Dr. Carolina Villarroel, of the U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Project—an innovative initiative that recovers and promotes Latino documentary heritage that has been historically silenced, marginalized, or overlooked. Dr. Baeza Ventura’s leadership extends beyond publishing and academia: she serves on the boards of several national organizations and scholarly publications, including the Association for Documentary Editing and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program, a landmark archival project dedicated to preserving and disseminating Latino contributions to American history and culture.

Sep.23- TBD- CLUB

Coming soon!

Sep. 30- TBD- Karl Berg

Coming Soon!

Oct. 7- Ballads of the Beat: The Valley, Chopped and Flipped- Jonathan Leal and Marisol Cortez

Ballads of the Beat: The Valley, Chopped and Flipped

Sample-driven beats are the lifeblood of contemporary music production. Born of hip hop’s chopping and flipping practices, they animate and juxtapose histories in ways that foreground how musical form, technology, repertoire, and locale are entwined. Beats are, in effect, layered worlds—sonic collages, tapestries of space and time.

In this talk, we’ll endeavor to tell a story about beatmaking as its own form of border theory in the Rio Grande Valley. Thinking alongside a few of today’s Valley producers, including Fronterawave, b11ce, panchaX beatz, and Valley Swerve, we’ll extend the implications of their creative work into the domains of music criticism, cultural theory, and contemporary #956 living through a set of linked questions. What happens when regional musics so central to borderlands cultural experience are sampled, chopped, and flipped into new forms? When corridos, boleros, and rancheras become the basis of beats and beat tapes? When the histories captured in those songs and their recorded forms are made to do new work in a broken world? What happens to the concepts and aesthetics of academic border inquiry when contemporary, localized music production techniques are brought into the fold? Through narrative-driven music criticism, artist interviews, and active listening, we’ll sit with these questions, emphasizing their importance for current and future understandings of borderlands experience, U.S. Latinidad, and American popular musics.

Jonathan Leal is a scholar, educator, and award-winning musician born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley. Currently based in Los Angeles, Leal earned an interdisciplinary PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University and is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press, 2023) and the co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury, 2021). Additionally, he is also the co-creator of numerous musical projects, including releases featured in Pitchfork, Latino USA, Texas Highways, Democracy Now, and elsewhere. Leal’s criticism and scholarship have appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Times, Air/Light Magazine, The Rumpus, Boston Globe, and elsewhere, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His next book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is a love letter to the Rio Grande Valley and is under contract with Duke University Press.

Oct. 14- TBD-Teresita Lozano

Title- Coming Soon!

My plan is to share about my experience as a singer and monologuist for a bilingual production called SALSA Lotería, an all-women monologue series comprised of seven Latina immigrants and post-migrants. I will discuss how the 1920s Mexican song, "Adiós Mariquita Linda" - which I sang as part of my contribution to the production -- transformed into an anthem for the immigrant experience through lyrical (textual) resignification during the course of our performances in the Boulder, Colorado and surrounding areas. I will elaborate on how this lyrical resignification was directly tied to transgenerational experiences of grief, nostalgia, and resilience among migrant women.

Oct. 21- The Work of UTRGV’s Translation and Interpreting Office- Gabriel González Núñez, Viridiana Zúñiga

The Work of UTRGV’s Translation & Interpreting Office

This presentation will address the creation of UTRGV’s Translation & Interpreting Office within the demographic and sociocultural context of the Rio Grande Valley. It will briefly provide an overview of the work done by the Office in the first decade of its existence and then move on to focus on the current work that the Office does in terms of translation (e.g., webpages, memorandums of understanding, contracts, marketing materials, informational pamphlets, syllabi, and questionnaires for the institution) and interpreting (for both the institution and external clients).

Gabriel González Núñez - Dr. González is an Associate Professor of Translation. He is currently serving as Director of UTRGV's Translation and Interpreting Programs. He holds a BA in Spanish Translation and a JD (from Brigham Young University), an MA in Translation and Intercultural Studies (from Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain), and a PhD in Translation Studies (KU Leuven in Belgium).

Viridiana Zúñiga Pelayo – Director Zúñiga is a translator and interpreter. She holds an MA in Translation and Interpreting from UTRGV, and a BA in Translation and Interpreting plus a Certificate in Medical Interpreting from UTRGV legacy institution The University of Texas at Brownsville.

Oct. 28- TBD- Salvatore Restifo

Coming Soon!

Nov. 4- TBD- Jack Newman

Coming Soon!

Nov. 11- TBD- David Martinez Prieto

Coming Soon!

Nov. 18- TBD- Glenn Martinez

Coming Soon!

Dec. 2- TBD- John and Margarita Foreman

Coming Soon!

English as a Second Language (ESL) & Linguistics Programs College of Liberal Arts