I am an Associate Professor of Spanish here at Iowa State. In regards to my current research, I identify broadly as a caribeñista, digital humanist, and engaged scholar. In 2019, I published Mapping Hispaniola: Third Space in Dominican and Haitian Literature with the University of Virginia Press. Mapping Hispaniola considers the ways Dominicans, Haitians and their US diasporas have imagined the physical and metaphorical border(s) that divide the island of Hispaniola. In 2021, I published, alongside my co-editor Edward Paulino, a multimodal and multivocal anthology titled The Border of Lights Reader: Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic (https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/1v53k057r). Further, I have recently published on Caribbean and Latinx literature in journals including Hispania, Confluencia, Chasqui, Children’s Literature, and Latino Studies. I also am interested in and have an active research agenda in the field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Community Engagement; I was a 2018-2019 Iowa Campus Compact Engaged Research Fellow and I currently serve as the Iowa State Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) Faculty Fellow for Active Learning and Community Engagement. My research informs my teaching and in the classroom at Iowa State I have taught everything from a senior seminar on contemporary Caribbean Literature to Spanish for Business and Textual and Media Analyses. I also co-direct the Languages and Cultures for Professions program here at Iowa State. Last but not least, I am the co-director of an LAS Global Seminar titled “Education and Environmental Sustainability in the Dominican Republic: Learning Through Community Engagement,” co-founder of Border of Lights, and a 2021-2022 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to the Dominican Republic.