President Elect Domnita Dumitrescu California State University, Los Angeles; Los Angeles, CA

Summary of CV

Domnita Dumitrescu (PhD in Hispanic linguistics from the University of Southern California) taught at California State University, Los Angeles  from 1987 to 2016. She is currently an emerita professor of Spanish linguistics. Before coming to the US, she was a tenured professor of Spanish at the University of Bucharest, Romania, and she also taught, as an invited lecturer, at UC Irvine and USC. She was a Fulbright scholar in Argentina, in 1993, teaching at several Argentinian institutions of higher education, including the Universities of Buenos  Aires, Tucuman,  Del Comahue, and San Juan, and she  lectured at several universities abroad, including the University of Costa Rica, the University of Alicante, Spain and the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Her areas of expertise are Spanish pragmatics, language contact between English and Spanish in the US, socio-pragmatic aspects of Spanish politeness, and   comparative studies between Spanish and Romanian, her native language. Her publications include several scholarly books, the most recent of which are Aspects of Spanish Pragmatics (Peter Lang, New York 2011), El español en los Estados Unidos: E Pluribus Unum? Enfoques multidisciplinarios (co-edition with Gerardo Piña-Rosales, ANLE, New York, 2013) and Hablando bien se entiende la gente (Santillana 2014, in co-autorship). She has also authored almost one hundred and fifty book chapters and  scholarly articles in peer reviewed journal, in her areas of expertise, as well as numerous literary translations and book reviews. Her editorial work includes being first an Associate Editor, and then, since 2011, the Book/Media Review Editor for Hispania, the scholarly journal of the AATSP.  She is also on the editorial boards of  Journal of Spanish Language  Teaching (Routledge), Pragmática sociocultural/Sociocultural Pragmatics (De Gruyter) and Language and Dialogue (John Benjamins).She  participated in hundreds of professional conferences in the United States, Canada, Europe and Latin America, reading papers, and/or  organizing and chairing panels or whole conferences. She is a member of the most prestigious scholarly organizations in her field (often holding elected offices in these organizations), and received numerous recognitions and awards, including the highest awards from Cal State LA (Outstanding Professor and President’s Distinguished professor), the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2000) and the Hispanic Honor Society Sigma Delta Pi (the Orders of the Discoverers and of Don Quijote). Her name is included in several Who’s Who reference works, and she is a Full Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish language, and a corresponding member in the United States of  the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Spain. She is currently a member of the inter-academic commission working on the next (24^th) edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish language (DLE), in charge of the areas of US and Philippines. She is also actively collaborating with the Cervantes Institute’s Observatory of the Spanish Language and  Hispanic Cultures  in the US, at Harvard University, where she recently co-directed the creation of an electronic bibliography of all the linguistics publications on US Spanish.

Read Domnita Dumitrescu's Full CV (PDF)

Statement of Candidacy 

I have been a member of the AATSP for thirty one years, and I participated in almost all of the annual meetings of the organization and most of the bi-annual meetings of the chapter to which I belong. I presented 20 papers at the annual meetings, 22 at the chapter meetings, and I organized numerous sessions and panels, including special joint sessions of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) and a Santillana featured presentation two years ago, in Panama. I also published several articles  and a good number of book reviews in Hispania, and I served the organization in numerous capacities, including  as  a member of the Executive Committee for 3 years, the MLA liaison for another 3 years, the Southern  California chapter president for two years, member of several award committees (including  the joint AATSP-Sigma Delta Pi award), and  an associate editor of Hispania for 6 years in charge of the section the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian World, which many times I confess I had to compose all by myself. Currently, as many of you know, I am finishing my sixth year as Book/media review editor of the journal, and I hope to continue, if my contract is renewed for 3 more years. 

As you can see, the AATSP has been a very important part of my professional life for many years, and I learned a lot from my participation in its meetings and my collaboration in its scholarly activities. The AATSP is also very dear to me for a personal reason: it gave me the first important professional recognition I got in this country, the 2000 Teacher of the Year Award, which is the last thing I shared with my mother, who was hospitalized during the Puerto Rico conference and died two days after, without regaining conscience after this conversation.

So, now that I retired after 50 years of teaching Spanish at the college level, and I am going to have a little more time (although I have several post-retirement scholarly projects underway),I want to give back to the organization to which I owe  so much of my professional growth  over  so many years. If I am elected, I will fight to make it stronger, to increase its membership and to consolidate its prestige, and I will do whatever it takes to have all Spanish and Portuguese professionals in this country embrace the conviction that belonging to the AATSP is the best badge of honor they can ever earn.  Those who know me know that I always keep my word… Thank you very much. Muchas gracias. Muito obrigada.

View video of Domnita Dumitrescu reading her statement of candidacy.