Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & LAS, University of Toronto

Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & LAS, University of Toronto A vibrant community exploring the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American languages, cultures, histories and their diasporas. Join us!

Expanded programs, research opportunities, and connections that cross borders.

How does language learning change over time — and how can researchers capture that change?Join us for the workshop “Long...
09/22/2026

How does language learning change over time — and how can researchers capture that change?

Join us for the workshop “Longitudinal Research in Language Learning: Design, Documentation, and Data” with Prof. Charlie Nagle.

The workshop will explore how researchers can design studies that follow language learning over time, from deciding when and how often to collect data to organizing, documenting and sharing research data.

Participants will also work through practical examples and see how individual learning trajectories can vary.

🗓️Thursday, October 8
🕒 3:00 p.m.
📍 Northrop Frye Hall, NF205

No prior experience with R is required.

Join us for the first event of this series of six events to explore and celebrate the diverse languages, cultures and tr...
09/21/2026

Join us for the first event of this series of six events to explore and celebrate the diverse languages, cultures and traditions represented across the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies.

Cultural Landscapes
🗓️ Friday, September 25
🕚 11 a.m.–1 p.m.
📍 Romero Room, Loretto College
70 St.Mary Street, 1st Floor

Discover how language, culture and community come together through an engaging cultural experience. This event launches the ISPLAS Cultural Series, running from September 2026 to March 2027.

All ISPLAS students, faculty and community members are welcome!

From language learning and cultural experiences to research on fascism, publishing, Boccaccio and Italian feminist debat...
09/16/2026

From language learning and cultural experiences to research on fascism, publishing, Boccaccio and Italian feminist debates, there’s a lot happening at ISPLAS.

In our latest stories, discover the research, ideas and people behind some of the work happening across the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies.

📰Read the latest news at isplas.utoronto.ca
📩 Subscribe to the ISPLAS Newsletter — link in bio.

What do we know about perception-production links in second language speech learning? Insights from an ongoing large-sca...
09/15/2026

What do we know about perception-production links in second language speech learning? Insights from an ongoing large-scale training study

Models of second language speech sound learning have long held that perception and production are related. On the one hand, this relationship seems intuitive: how can you produce a sound or contrast that you cannot reliably perceive? On the other hand, the existing literature paints a far more complex picture of the perception-production link.

Researchers have approached this topic using both observational and experimental methods to examine how perception and production abilities unfold and interact over time or over the course of training. On the whole, even though both abilities tend to improve, those gains are not necessarily linked in time or in magnitude. Likewise, pooled estimates suggest that perception training leads to small but credible gains in production, though individual studies report a range of results.

In this talk, Prof. Charlie Nagle draws on an ongoing large-scale study where English speakers are trained in Thai and Korean to show how tracking perception and production across multiple tasks, languages, and training conditions can help characterize the perception-production link with a level of granularity that has been difficult to achieve in smaller or single-language studies. He argues this approach offers a more systematic way to test existing accounts of the perception-production link and to generate new, testable hypotheses to inform models and point toward techniques likely to facilitate cross-modality transfer.

🗓️ Friday, October 9

🕑 2:00 p.m.

📍Victoria College, VC206

Charlie Nagle is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Speech Learning Lab at The University of Texas at Austin. His research examines crosslinguistic influence in speech perception and production, with a particular focus on how training paradigms and instructional procedures can be optimized. He is also committed to advancing open science practices and collaborative research in speech science.

Indigenous political mobilization in the Americas raises important normative and empirical questions: How are different ...
09/10/2026

Indigenous political mobilization in the Americas raises important normative and empirical questions: How are different states responding to Indigenous peoples’ demands for greater recognition and representation? What are the democratic implications of Indigenous demands for autonomy from the state? And, in what ways does the project of decolonization unsettle the practice of democracy?

Based on a structured, focused comparison of the cases of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nunavut, and Yukon—arguably the most successful examples of the institutional pathway to Indigenous autonomy and self-government in the Americas—this talk explores real-world initiatives to upend colonial mindsets and practices within existing democracies.

In order to do democracy better, and not just differently, settler states in Canada and Latin America will need to come to terms with the responsibilities and obligations of having different nations occupying the same space.

This talk will also address the challenges and opportunities of carrying out research in the emerging subfield of comparative Indigenous politics, including crossing disciplinary, geographic, cultural, and linguistic divides. There are risks to such academic trespassing. The search for broader generalizations on Indigenous politics in the Americas, however, has the potential to generate sufficiently interesting insights to warrant the effort.

Roberta Rice is a professor and Department Head of Political Science at the University of Calgary. Her research focuses on Indigenous politics, democracy, political representation and Latin America. She is also the interim director of the International Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Calgary.

She is the author of Doing Democracy Differently: Indigenous Rights and Representation in Canada and Latin America (University of Calgary Press, 2024), which won the 2025 Best Book Award prize from the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS).

🗓️ October 2
📍Northrop Frye Hall, NF007
🕑 2:00 to 4:30 p.m.

Join us for this timely conversation on Indigenous rights, democracy and decolonization in Canada and Latin America.

How can we make learning Spanish an active, meaningful experience connected to culture? This presentation showcases two ...
09/09/2026

How can we make learning Spanish an active, meaningful experience connected to culture? This presentation showcases two pedagogical experiences developed in Moodle to learn Spanish through action, exploration, and culture.

The first experience, the Virtual Museum of Afro-Colombian Art, invites students to discover artworks and cultural expressions through interactive activities and a 360° virtual tour. The second, the Gastronomic Fair of Five Spanish-Speaking Countries, encourages students to explore language and culture through food, combining interactive activities, vocabulary, grammar, and assignments. Both experiences were developed at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) as part of the Spanish program.

Ultimately, this approach brings technology, culture, and action together to transform language learning into a more active, immersive, and meaningful experience.

Jessica Payeras is a Full Professor of Spanish as a Foreign Language at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She holds both a Ph.D. and a Master’s degree in Linguistics from UQAM and has more than 30 years of experience in university teaching.

She integrates digital technologies into her courses to enrich learning and provide her students with immersive educational experiences. Her teaching approach combines theory and practice, with a strong emphasis on interaction and student engagement.

Jessica is committed to creating stimulating learning environments that foster student success and motivation. She is also a member of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and co-director of two research centres: RELAM (Montreal Network for Latin American Studies) and GERACII (Research Group on International and Intercultural Communication).

How does university really work?Dr. Berenice Villagómez has seen it from almost every angle. Over nearly 25 years at the...
09/04/2026

How does university really work?

Dr. Berenice Villagómez has seen it from almost every angle. Over nearly 25 years at the University of Toronto, she has been a student, course instructor, scholar, program administrator and student advocate.

Now, she’s ready to share some of the stories and perspectives on university life that you probably won’t find on the syllabus.

Curious? Bring your questions and join us for an informal conversation with Berenice.

For registration link in our bio

Join us in welcoming Dr. Irene Villa, a new Postdoctoral Fellow at ISPLAS, whose research explores the history and ongoi...
08/31/2026

Join us in welcoming Dr. Irene Villa, a new Postdoctoral Fellow at ISPLAS, whose research explores the history and ongoing significance of debates around gender, sexuality and feminism.

Dr. Villa examines feminist movements, q***r politics and sexuality studies, challenging long-held assumptions about Italian feminism while uncovering voices and debates that have often remained at the margins of dominant narratives.

Her current research project, The Italian Feminist S*x Wars, revisits the political and intellectual conflicts of the 1990s, exploring how competing understandings of feminism, sexuality, and le***an politics emerged and developed during this decade. She is also co-editing a volume, Who’s Afraid of Gender in Italy?, which explores contemporary anti-gender politics in Italy while recovering q***r genealogies of resistance.

How can looking at the past help us better understand today’s conversations about gender, identity and social change?

Stay tuned—we’ll soon share more about Irene’s research and the questions driving her work.

*xualityStudies

Are you still looking for a course to add to your Fall schedule?Ever wondered what your star sign says about your academ...
08/28/2026

Are you still looking for a course to add to your Fall schedule?

Ever wondered what your star sign says about your academic options? 🔮📚

Swipe through to find the ISPLAS course that might just be written in the stars for you. From Aries energy to Pisces creativity, there’s a course match for every cosmic personality. 🌟

We are pleased to welcome Professor Elaine Grolla from the University of São Paulo (USP), who has joined ISPLAS as a vis...
08/28/2026

We are pleased to welcome Professor Elaine Grolla from the University of São Paulo (USP), who has joined ISPLAS as a visiting professor until July 14, 2027.

Professor Grolla is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at USP and a leading scholar in Portuguese linguistics, with research focusing on child language acquisition and the syntax of child language in Portuguese and other languages.

During her visit to the University of Toronto, Professor Grolla will continue her research on children’s production of Wh-questions and relative clauses, while developing experimental research on the relationship between children’s language development, inhibition control and working memory.

Her research explores how children’s sentence production is shaped by both their developing grammar and their executive functions. By looking at how working memory and inhibitory control interact with linguistic knowledge, she seeks to better understand how children process complex structures and how language unfolds during development.

We look forward to welcoming Professor Grolla to ISPLAS and to the many opportunities for research and collaboration her visit will bring to our community!

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