Sybil Alexandrov

Senior Lector II in Spanish and Portuguese

Sybil Alexandrov, BA, Stanford University; MA, Stanford University and Harvard University; faculty member at Yale since 1997: You are a teacher of Spanish, a mentor and counselor of equal distinction to students, and a community citizen, por excelencia.

As an undergraduate at Stanford, you had a major specifically designed for you to include concentration in four Romance languages: French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, any of which you would be qualified to teach. Starting in California in the late seventies, you taught as a teaching fellow at Stanford, in a Redwood City bilingual program for children of migrant workers, and as a lecturer at UC San Diego. You went on to serve as a section leader at Harvard, an adjunct professor at Quinnipiac College, and a language instructor at Choate Rosemary Hall—a depth and wealth of experience that equipped you, as someone who had seen it all and taught all kinds of students, to be the perfect language teacher at lucky Yale.

Once here, you quickly became a student favorite. An expert on teaching beginners as well as heritage students, you also spearheaded the development of multilanguage heritage courses at Yale and cofounded The Heritage Language, a hub of resources for heritage language teachers and language programs at all levels of education.  

You were quickly engaged in departmental administration, in time serving as the codirector of Spanish 155 and then codirector and director of 116, developing the syllabi and overseeing instructors and graduate students for both courses—and as a member of numerous search and other departmental committees as well.

When the FAS-SEAS Faculty Senate was founded in 2017, you immediately became deeply involved as a member of the Executive Council and in other important senate committees. You worked there tirelessly, particularly in support of instructional faculty, who are often not only exceptional teachers, cementing Yale’s worldwide reputation as preeminent in undergraduate instruction, but also vital mentors and counselors.

For all of this, you have received two distinguished and cherished awards: in 2023, the Elga R. Wasserman Award for your leadership on behalf of instructional faculty; and, in 2011, the Richard H. Brodhead ’68 Teaching Prize. As a sign that your teaching excellence has never faltered, at your final Heritage Spanish class in December 2024 your students—most of whom were the first in their families to attend college—all arrived in T-shirts with “I Love Sybil” printed on them, a sentiment which the faculty of Yale College warmly endorses.