Faculty e-Curriculum Vitae

 
 
 
 
Name : Reynaldo Romero
Position/Title : Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics
UHD e-mail : romerore@uhd.edu
   
 

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND / TRAINING

 
  • Graduate Certificate in Public Health (The University of Texas-Health Science Center 2019)
  • Ph.D. Spanish Linguistics (Georgetown University 2009)
  • M.A. Spanish Linguistics (Georgetown University 2004)
  • B.A. Spanish Language and Linguistics (Rice University 2002)
  • B.A. French Language (Rice University 2002)
  • B.A. Linguistics (Rice University 2002)
  • ATA Certified (2018)
  • Licensed Trainer, The Community Interpreter® (TOT 2018)
  • Certificate in Criminal Proceedings Interpretation (Southern California School of Interpretation 2017)
  • Online Teaching Certificate, specialization: Online tools (Online Learning Consortium 2016)
  • Certificate in Medical Interpretation (Southern California School of Interpretation 2014)
   
     
 

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

  University appointments:
  • University of Houston-Downtown
  • Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics; 2016-present
  • Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics; 2010-2016
  • Translation Minor Coordinator; 2010-present
  • Interpreting Minor Coordinator; 2018-present
  • University of Houston Law Center
  • Adjunct Professor of Legal Spanish; 2016-present
  • University of Houston Continuing and Professional Studies
  • Instructor of Translation; 2014-2017
  • Instructor of Medical Translation; 2015-2017
  • Texas A&M University
  • Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics; 2012
  • University of Texas-Pan American
  • Lecturer of Spanish Linguistics; 2009-2010
  • Georgetown University
  • Spanish Instructor; 2003-2009

Other teaching projects:

  • Texas Young Lawyer's Association (TYLA); 2018
  • Spanish for Lawyers Video CLE course (free online course)
   
     
 

SIGNIFICANT PUBLICATIONS / SCHOLARSHIP / RESEARCH / CREATIVE ENDEAVORS

 

 
I. Book:
 
1. Romero, Rey (2012). Spanish in the Bosphorus: A sociolinguistic study on the Judeo-Spanish dialect spoken in Istanbul.  Libra: Istanbul.
 
II. Refereed articles and book chapters:
 
2. Romero, Rey and Sandro Sessarego (2018). "Hard come, easy go: Linguistic interfaces in Istanbulite Judeo-Spanish and Afro-Ecuadorian Spanish." In Jeremy King and Sandro Sessarego (eds.) Language Variation and Contact-Induced Change: Spanish across Space and Time, pp. 63-81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
 
3. Romero, Rey (2017). "Agreement and valuation of phi-features in Judeo-Spanish: A cross-generational account." In Juan J. Colomina-Almiñana (ed.) Contemporary Advances in Theoretical and Applied Spanish Linguistic Variation, pp. 183-200. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
 
4. Romero, Rey (2017). "En tierras virtualas: Sociolinguistic implications for Judeo-Spanish as a cyber-vernacular." In Mahir Saul and José Ignacio Hualde (eds.). Sepharad as Imagined Community: Language, History and Religion from the Early Modern Period to the 21st Century, pp. 275-290. New York: Peter Lang.  
 
5. Romero, Rey (2016). "Code-switching and immigrant identity in Rosa Nissán's Hisho que te nazca." Sephardic Horizons. 6:3/4.
 
6. Romero, Rey (2016). "Trabajar es en español, en ladino es lavorar": Lexical accommodation in Judeo-Spanish. In Sandro Sessarego and Fernando Tejedo-Herrero (eds.) Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis, pp. 381-400.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
 
7. Romero, Rey (2016). El judeoespañol. In Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.) Enciclopedia de lingüística hispánica, Volume 2, pp. 661-668. London/New York: Routledge. 
 
8. Romero, Rey (2015). Dialect concentration and dissipation: Challenges to Judeo-Spanish revitalization efforts. In Bryan Kirschen (ed.) Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
 
9. Romero, Rey (2014). Variation in ser and estar in Istanbulite Judeo-Spanish: Internal and external processes. International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 33.1, pp. 109-125.
 
10. Romero, Rey (2014). Compensating for the loss of linguistic domains: Glosses in Judeo-Spanish texts. Chapter 3 in Rafael Orozco (ed.) New Directions in Hispanic Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
 
11. Ciriza, María del Puy, Marco Shappeck, and Rey Romero (2013) Modal ya in Basque Spanish, Andean Spanish, and Judeo-Spanish: Accounting for contact-induced change. International Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 32.1.
 
12. Romero, Rey (2013). Palatal east meets velar west: Dialect contact and phonological accommodation in Judeo-Spanish.  Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 6:2.
 
13. Romero, Rey (2011). Variation in Balkan Judeo-Spanish final clauses. Ianua Revista Philologica Romanica Vol. 11.
 
14. Romero, Rey  (2011) Issues of Spanish language maintenance in the Prince Islands. Chapter 10 in Cortazar, Alejandro and Rafael Orozco (eds.) Lenguaje, arte y revoluciones ayer y hoy: New Approaches to Hispanic Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Studies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 
 
15. Romero, Rey (2011) Mainland vs. island: a comparative morphological study of Spanish-Turkish contact. Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics. Cascadilla Press.  
 
16. Romero, Rey (2010) A Greek transliteration of Judeo-Spanish: Notes on a poem from Trikala (1885) Ianua Revista Philologica Romanica Vol. 10.
 
17. Romero, Rey (2009) Lexical borrowing and gender assignment in Judeo-Spanish. Ianua Revista Philologica Romanica Vol. 9

18. Romero, Rey (2008) Turkish word order and case in modern Judeo-Spanish spoken in Istanbul. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics. Cascadilla Press.  

 
IV. Refereed Conference Presentations:
 
1. 5th Annual Summer Assessment Symposium at the University of Houston. "Best practices for assessment of community-based projects in disciplines not traditionally associated with service learning." In collaboration with Dr. Olin Bjork and Dr. Creshema Murray. 6/19
 
2. 6th Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. "Translation and interpreting as pedagogical tools in the Medical Spanish classroom"  2/22
 
3.90th South Atlantic Modern Language Association  (SAMLA 90) in Birmingham, Alabama. "Empowering student agency in SLCE projects in the translation classroom" 11/2/18
 
4. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS 2018) at the University of Texas at Austin. “Vulnerable feature domains in Judeo-Spanish” 10/26/18

5. 75th South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA 75) in San Antonio, TX. "Service learning and community engagement in the translation classroom" (October 2018)
 
6.12th Texas Association of Healthcare Interpreters and Translators (TAHIT) Educational Symposium in San Antonio, TX. "A proposed protocol for volunteer interpreters during disaster relief efforts" (September 2018)
 
7.Ninth Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS9) at Queens College-City University of New York. "Variation in /s/ and /θ/ distinction in Guinean Spanish spoken in Houston" (April 2018)
 
8. Healthcare Access for Linguistic Minorities Network Conference at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. "Medical information and language access: Lessons learned from Houston school districts" (September 2017)
 
9. 11th Texas Association of Healthcare Interpreters and Translators (TAHIT) Educational Symposium in Austin, TX. "From practice to classroom: Creating a syllabus for medical translation" (September 2017)
 
10. University of Houston Summer Assessment Symposium in Houston, TX. "Assessment plan for service learning and community engagement outside social services disciplines," in collaboration with Dr. Murray and Dr. Bjork (June 2017).
 
11. South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA 83) in Dallas, TX. "The role of heritage language varieties in the medical Spanish classroom" (November 2016).
 
12. Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO 45) at the University of Texas at Austin. "The other heritage speakers: On the linguistic needs of Spanish heritage language learners from Asia and Africa" (September 2016).
 
13. 10th Texas Association of Healthcare Interpreters and Translators (TAHIT) Educational Symposium in Ft. Worth, TX. "Rendering non-standard varieties in medical interactions" (September 2016).
 
14. South Central Association for Language Learning Technology (SOCALLT) in Houston, TX. "Social interaction through prewriting activities in Spanish online" (May 2016).
 
15. 131st Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Austin, TX. Panel 231. Major Sephardic Novelists: The Risks They Take. "Linguistic risks in Rosa Nissán's Hisho que te nasca" (January 2016).
 
16. 25th Conference on Spanish in the United States and 10th Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages at the City College of New York. "Características léxicas y morfológicas del judeoespañol neoyorquino" (March 2015).
 
17. Second Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language (SSHL 2) at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX. "Validating heritage languages in the language for specific purposes classroom" (February 2015).
 
18. South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA 71) in Austin, TX. Panel VII Spanish Linguistics. "Judeo-Spanish folk literature as a corpus for diachronic variation: Data from Monastir, Bucharest, Salonika, Skopje, and Istanbul" (October 2014).
 
19. Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO 43), Heritage Languages (of the Southwest) in the Era of e-learning at the California State University-San Marcos. "Nasal epenthesis in Spanish: Auto segmental spreading, failed change, or hypercorrection?" (September 2014).
 
20. Seventh International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS7) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Dialect dissipation through lexical accommodation: Judeo-Spanish in Istanbul and New York City" (April 2014).
 
21. 3rd Judeo-Spanish Symposium at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Dialect concentration and dissipation: Challenges to Judeo-Spanish revitalization efforts" (March 2014).
 
22. XXIX Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Louisiana State University. "Social mobility and morphological variation: Judeo-Spanish in Balat and Kuzguncuk" (February 2014).
 
23. XXIX Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Louisiana State University. "Hard come, easy go: Grammatical interfaces in Judeo-Spanish and Afro-Hispanic varieties," in collaboration with Dr. Sandro Sessarego (U of Wisconsin-Madison) (February 2014).
 
24. Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO 42).  Spanish in the Age of Technology at the College of New Jersey and West Chester University. "Spanish-Turkish bilingualism and lexical incorporation in Crónica de los Reyes Otomanos (16th century)" (September 2013).
 
25. 24th Conference on Spanish in the United States and 9th Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages at University of Texas-Pan American."El uso de las cópulas en el judeoespañol estambulí: ¿Variación por contacto o restructuración interna?" (March 2013).
 
26. 24th Conference on Spanish in the United States and 9th Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages at the University of Texas-Pan American. "Contact-induced pragmatic innovations? Discursive ya in Basque Spanish, Quichua Spanish, and Judeo-Spanish," in collaboration with Dr. Maria Ciriza-Lope and Dr. Marco Shappeck (U of North Texas-Dallas). (March 2013). 
 
27. Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO 41). Are Language Borders Expanding, Evolving, or Eroding? at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. "On the dialectal written production by Spanish heritage speakers in Houston." (October 2012).
 
28. Linguistics Association of the Southwest (LASSO 41). Are Language Borders Expanding, Evolving, or Eroding? at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. "Innovative values of the adverb ya in Judeo-Spanish, Basque Spanish, and Quichua Spanish," in collaboration with Dr. Maria Ciriza-Lope and Dr. Marco Shappeck (U of North Texas-Dallas). (October 2012).
 
29. Sixth International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS6) at the University of Arizona at Tucson. “Dialect contact and phonological accommodation in Istanbulite Judeo-Spanish” (April 2012).

30. XXVIII Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Louisiana State University. “Compensating for the loss of linguistic domains: Interlinear glosses in Judeo-Spanish texts” (February 2012).
 
31. Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO 40). English and Spanish in Contact at the University of Texas-Brownsville. “Tres wug(e)s: Variation in plural allomorphs in Spanish-English bilinguals" (October 2011).
 
32. Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics (GURT 2011). "Communities of endangered languages online as resources for sociolinguistic research: Morphosyntactic and lexical variation in the Ladinokomunita Yahoo! Group" (March 2011).
 
33. 39th New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV 39) at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "(Un)Systematic variants in endangered languages: Judeo-Spanish subordinate clauses" (November 2010).
 
34. Minority Languages in Europe: Successes and Challenges at Indiana University at Bloomington. "Dialect v. standard in revitalization efforts: Judeo-Spanish and Spanish in Istanbul" (October 2010).
 
35. Fifth International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS5) at North Carolina State University. "Mainland v. island: A comparative morphological study of Spanish-Turkish contact" (April 2010).
 
36. XXVII Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Louisiana State University. "Issues of Spanish language maintenance in the Prince Islands" (February 2010).
 
37. Temple University Conference on Spanish and Portuguese Studies. "Loss, preservation, and innovation in agreement in an endangered dialect: Judeo-Spanish in Istanbul" (October 2008).
 
38. Fourth Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS4) at State University of New York at Albany. "Turkish case and word order in modern Judeo-Spanish spoken in Istanbul" (April 2008).
 
39. Graduate Portuguese & Hispanic Symposium at Georgetown University. "The Judeo-Spanish para ke subjunctive construction" (September 2006).
 
V. Invited Speaker:
 
40. Lousiana State University. Guest speaker. Course on Spanish Linguistics by Dr. Rafael Orozco. "Glosses in Judeo-Spanish texts." November 2015. 
 
41. University of Texas at Austin. Guest speaker. Seminar on Contact Linguistics by Dr. Sandro Sessarego. "Lexical borrowing in Judeo-Spanish." February 2015.
 
42. University of South Carolina. Guest speaker. Sponsored by the Spanish Program of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and the Latin American Studies Program. "A tale of two city language shifts: Spanish in Houston and Judeo-Spanish in New York City." March 2014. 
 
43. University of South Carolina. Spring 2014 Speaker Series-No Limits! Guest speaker sponsored by the Linguistics Program at the College of Arts and Sciences. "Morphological innovations in Judeo-Spanish heritage speakers." March 2014.  
 
44. Texas A&M University. Language Matters. Guest speaker sponsored by the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Glasscock Center, and the Religious Studies Program. "Hispanic identity and Spanish language maintenance: The curious case of Sephardic Spanish in Istanbul." November 2013.
 
45. Texas A&M University. Guest speaker at the Spanish Dialectology course. "Back to the future: What can Judeo-Spanish teach us about the evolution of Spanish contact varieties?" November 2013.
 
46. The University of Montana. Guest speaker at Spanish Phonetics and Phonology course. "Observaciones sobre la fonología actual del judeoespañol." March 2013.
 
47. Açik Radyo 94.9. (Istanbul) Inside Outside. "Rey Romero on Spanish in the Bosphorus." December 10th, 2012. Radio interview. http://acikradyo.com.tr/podcast/163491
 
48. University of Houston- Department of  Hispanic Studies. "On losing Spanish: Heritage speakers from Houston and Istanbul." Invited lecture. November 2012.
 
49. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Language at the University of Texas at Austin. "Where does Judeo-Spanish fit in the Spanish linguistic canon? Fascination, imagination, and omission." October 2011. 
 
50. University of Texas-Pan American International Week. “Adaptación de la proyección del otro en la cinta Morirse está en hebreo.”(November 2009)
 
51. Hispanic Heritage Month at South Texas College. "The border effect on South Texas Spanish." (October 2009)
 
 
VI. Awards and Grants:
 
1. University of Houston-Downtown Funded Faculty Leave Award.  Award for research and writing "The Revitalization of Judeo-Spanish" for Fall 2017.
 
2. Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence Grant for Teaching Circle. "Assessing Community Engagement beyond Social Services Disciplines." In Collaboration with Dr. C. Murray and O. Bjork. 2016-2017; renewed 2017-2018.
 
3. UHD Faculty Development Grant. Training and materials for court interpreting and translation. 2015-2016.
 
4. Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence Grant for Online Education. Full funding and stipend for OLC certificate program with specialization in online learners. 2015.
 
5. Center for Public Service and Family Strenghts, Community Engagement Mini Grant. Stipend for service learning project involving the translation and critical analysis of documents and forms related to the immigration process. 2014-2015.
 
6. UHD Cultural Enrichment Center Grant. To fund the talk series Language and Professions; three presenters on the role of language proficiency in legal professions. 2014.
 
7. UHD Faculty Development Grant. Training and materials for Medical and Legal Translation and Interpretation. 2013-2014.
 
8. UHD Organized Research Grant. To conduct research in New York City on Judeo-Spanish language maintenance and transmission. 2012-2014. 
 
9. Institute of Turkish Studies Summer Research Grant. To conduct research on Spanish-Turkish bilingualism in the Prince Islands, Turkey. 2009.