Jorge Alejandro Méndez-Seijas

Jorge Méndez-Seijas joins the department of Spanish and Portuguese as a Senior Lector II & Associate Research Scholar. He will be serving as the Language Program Director. Jorge holds a Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition from Georgetown University. Before joining Yale, he taught and served as a course and/or program coordinator at Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, and the University of Rhode Island. Jorge’s research interests include Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, Curriculum Design, Heritage Language Education, and Phonetics and Phonology. He frequently presents at national and international conferences and publishes his work in specialized scholarly venues. Among his most recent projects, he has developed i) content-based beginning language courses dealing with issues of cultural, environmental, and social sustainability; ii) critically-oriented courses for heritage speakers of Spanish; and iii) advanced courses exploring social justice challenges in the Spanish-speaking world (conferred the 2020 Innovation in Language Program Direction Award: Racial/social justice by AAUSC: http://www.aausc.org/AAUSCblog/9418161).