My doctoral dissertation, “Cracking the Male Code: The Politicization of Gender in Latin American Guerrilla Literature (2009),” explores how and why a new masculinity that struggles to break with traditional machista praxis dominant in patriarchal societies emerges in five rebel narratives that represent different phases in the history of Latin American revolutions beginning with the Cuban Revolution (1959) and ending with the Contemporary Zapatista Movement in Mexico (1994).  Beyond this concrete research focus, I am interested in evaluating how literature is used as a tool to reflect upon and disseminate images and views of the power dynamics of political change, in particular, the New Song Movements of the 60s and beyond, shaped initially by voices such as Silvio Rodríguez (Cuba), Victor Jara (Chile), and Mercedes Sosa (Argentina), among others, and then adapted to the new global context through international artists like Manú Chao (former leader of Mano Negra) and Zack de la Mota (Rage Against the Machine).

 In addition to my interests in the intersections of literature and politics, after completing UBC’s International Program for the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership (2015-2016), I have also begun to carry out original practice-based research on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Educational Leadership (SoEL) as a means to root my approaches to teaching, learning and leadership in existing scholarly practices.  I am particularly interested in community-oriented approaches to skill-focused language learning.  My paper “Strategic Visioning: Analyzing for a Multilingual Learning Centre in FHIS,” highlights the process through which I transformed the FHIS Writing Centre, a peer-based writing centre, into a broad-reaching Multilingual Learning Centre that boasts a holistic and community-oriented approach to learning additional languages here at UBC. Here is a link to a recent conference presentation on this topic at the 2016 meeting of the 2016 TYCA-PNWCA Conference Moving Beyond the Page TYCA-PNWCA.