After nine years, Dr. Jeff Shumway has completed his tenure as the Latin American Studies faculty coordinator; we appreciate the many years of effort he has put into the program.
We are pleased to announce that the new coordinator will be Dr. Marlene Hansen Esplin of the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters. She will begin in that position on 1 July 2025; the two coordinators will overlap for two months, with Shumway officially completing his time as coordinator at the end of August.
Esplin has a lifelong interest in Latin America that is both personal and academic. “My mother’s mother was an immigrant to the US from Argentina, and my mother is a heritage speaker of Spanish,” she explains. “My maternal grandfather also worked for the US Border Patrol, and I grew up in Texas surrounded by both English and Spanish speakers. However, it wasn’t until I started studying Spanish and Latin American literature and culture as a BYU undergrad that I began to approach these aspects of my background through an academic lens.”
At BYU, she earned a degree in Humanities with minors in Spanish, Russian and International Development, followed by a master’s degree in Comparative Literature from BYU and a PhD in Hispanic Cultural Studies from Michigan State University. She recalls that when she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, her family put a sign on the garage door (see picture below) congratulating her: “¡Bien hecho, doctora! Que viva mi mamá!” (“Well done, doctor! Long live my mom!”) Her confused neighbors assumed that she’d recently had her life saved by a medical doctor.
She began teaching at BYU in 2014 in the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters. Her research, she says, “concerns problems of translation between US and Latin American literatures, including a longstanding interest in self-translators or writers who write distinct versions of their works in both English and Spanish. I am also interested in the linguistic contours of migration and exile and in matters of multilingualism, language justice, and gender studies.”
Dr. Esplin has long been what she describes as “a general groupie of Kennedy Center activities and programs.” As an undergraduate, her International Development minor kept her close to the Kennedy Center, and now that she’s a professor at BYU, she has been a faculty affiliate with Latin American Studies, European Studies, and American Studies, and has been on the Global Women’s Studies Executive Committee. She’s also led two study abroad programs: a GE program in Spain with her husband Emron, a BYU English professor, and the Human Rights, Women’s Rights program for Global Women’s Studies with Dr. Melissa Goates Jones in Psychology. Of becoming the Latin American Studies program coordinator, she says, “I’m very happy for the chance to be even more involved in current Kennedy Center initiatives.”
Her new coordinator position is an excellent fit for her interests and approach to her research, she says: “In my research and courses about Latin America, I’m wholly committed to an interdisciplinary approach to recurrent questions and topics in Latin American history and culture.” This meshes well with the program and the Kennedy Center’s interdisciplinary focus: “The Latin American Studies program at BYU is a hub for interdisciplinary approaches (mostly involving the humanities and social sciences) to Latin American topics, whether migration, sports, food, historical topics, or the arts,” she says. “I am convinced that this interdisciplinary approach helps students gain global and cultural awareness and valuable experience thinking across disciplinary and national divides.”
And that approach, she says, benefits the students who study Latin American Studies—both in their future careers and in their communities. “I feel that Latin American Studies students should be well prepared to become community leaders and peacemakers able to build bridges across national, cultural, and linguistic borders,” she says.
As she approaches the beginning of her time in the position, she says that she’s most eager about working with students and helping them reach their professional goals; she hopes to “work with Kennedy Center advisors to help students land quality internships or work-study experiences that will help them advance toward their future career ends.”
She adds, “I’d also love to build more connections with organizations that serve Latino populations in Utah and in the United States (a definite stronghold of Latin American culture), and I’d like to help launch an annual Latin American Studies study abroad program that would model the kind of interdisciplinary approaches to studying Latin America culture and history that we adopt in Latin American Studies courses.”
“Also,” she concludes, “selfishly, I want to create lots of opportunities to share good food (tacos!) and conversation with students, colleagues, and visiting scholars.”
Learn more about the Latin American Studies program here.