New Cabell Hall 437
Office Hours: Tues 3:30-4:30pm, Wed 2:00-3:00pm & by appt; Zoom link

Research Summary

Please download Dr. Sprague's current C.V. for a full list of her publications, awards, and interests in research and teaching.

Education

Ph.D., Modern Peninsular Spanish Literature; University of Wisconsin-Madison (2002)

M.A., Hispanic language and literatures; University of Wisconsin-Madison

B,A., Spanish; Knox College

Dissertation

My dissertation is a comparative study of romantic poetics and nationalist discourse in 19th century Spain.

Research Interests

• Hispanic poetry
• Media and film
• Periodicals in social change
• Catalan studies
• Bilingualism
• Composition pedagogy
• Language teaching

Teaching

 UVA Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (2012-present):

• SPAN 2020 – Advanced Intermediate Spanish
• SPAN 3010 – Grammar & Composition I
• SPAN 3020 – Grammar & Composition II
• SPAN 3040 – Business Spanish
• SPAN 3300 – Texts and Interpretation

Previous experience (Trinity College and Dartmouth College):

• Beginning and Intermediate language
• Iberian and Latin American Music & Conversation
• Iberian and Latin American Film & Conversation
• Studying in the Hispanic World (Post study-abroad seminar)
• From Romantics to Moderns: The Nineteenth Century
• Hispanic Literature II:  Survey of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Hispanic Literature III: Surey of Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
• Poetics and Politics of Love in Contemporary Spanish Poetry
• Turn-of-the-Century Literature in Spain
• Avant-garde Movements and Social Poetry in Spain
• Exile, Repression and Writing in Post-Civil War Spain
• Recent Spanish Poetry: The Re-conquest of Subjectivity

Other teaching:

• Study-abroad - Dartmouth College
• Directed and taught in 3 study-abroad programs in Spain.

Selected Publications

El Europeo (Barcelona, 1823-1824): Prensa, modernidad y universalismo (Madrid: Editorial Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009).   

“Lecciones de geografía: Escenarios poéticos/políticos del fin-de-siglo”.  En buena compañía. Ensayos en honor de Luciano García Lorenzo (Madrid: CSIC, 2009), pp. 995-1004.

“Parodia y paradoja en el primer Pitarra: La estética fundacional de Frederic Soler contra la Renaixença”. Estrenado con gran aplauso: Teatro español, 1844-1936. Collected essays (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Vervuert 2008), pp. 99-114.

Book Reviews

Barcelona: An Urban History of Science and Modernity, 1888-1929, by Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan, eds. Routledge, 2016. Forthcoming in Catalan Review (2017).

Letters to a Young Poet, by Joan Margarit; translation by Christopher Maurer. In Catalan Review, XXVI (2012).

Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain. Centres of Exchange and Cultural Imaginaries, by Alison Sinclair. In Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (12.3): 2012.

Tecnología, espectáculo, literatura. Dispositivos ópticos en las letras españolas de los siglos XVIII & XIX, by Luis Miguel Fernández. In The Eighteenth Century: a Current Bibliography (32): 2010.

Presentations

“Necessary Rust: A poetics of Joan Margarit”. XVI International Colloquium of the North American Catalan Society (NACS); University of Indiana. 2017.

“A Mobile Romanticism: Fiorenzo Galli and El Europeo”. Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference; James Madison University. 2016.

“Pedagogies for teaching 20th & 21st Century Literature from Spain”. Two-day workshop for high school and college instructors. El Foro Internacional por la lectura, Argentina. 2016.

​"Reading the Newspaper: What 19th-Century Periodicals Can tell us About Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Spain". UVA Institue of World Languages Roundtable on Foreign Language Teaching & Learning Grant Exhibition. 2016.

“A Positivist-Romantic Project: El Propagador de la Libertat y El poeta y el banquero”. XV International Colloquium of the North American Catalan Society (NACS); Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona, Spain. 2015.

Round Table on Foreign Language Teaching & Learning (RTFL). “From Sentence to Paragraph(s): Teaching Writing and Critical Thinking in Foreign Language Classrooms”  with Dr. James Seitz, Director of the Academic and Professional Writing Program, and Esther Poveda, SIP Lecturer. UVA. 2014.

Round Table on Foreign Language Teaching & Learning (RTFL). “Turn Up the Heat, Creative use of Games in the Classroom” with Carrie Bramlet, Eperanza Gorriz, Esther Poveda, and Matthew Street. UVA. 2014.

“Humor and Politics in Sexenio Periodicals (Barcelona and Madrid)”. Kentucky Foreign  Language Conference (KFLC); Lexington, KY. 2012.

Panel:  "Joan Maragall: A Legacy of Engagement". Organized and chaired panel, Modern Language Association Annual Convention (MLA); Seattle, WA. 2012.

"After Study-abroad: Pedagogies for Coming Home". Conference of the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS); Hanover, NH. 2011.

Grants & Awards (at UVa)

Facutly Initiated Project Grant, Institute of World Languages, UVA. 2016-2017.

Pilot of Spanish Language Writing Tutoring. 2016-2017.

UVA Institute for World Languages Faculty Development Grant; conference travel. 2015.