Sheri Spaine Long (PhD, UCLA) is currently an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where she teaches Spanish language, literature, and culture courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. She has also directed study abroad programs to Latin America and Spain for teachers, undergraduates and honors students. As a scholar, she bridges the study of languages and literatures. Her fields of interest are broad and range from contemporary Spanish prose to Spanish language and culture, foreign language pedagogy and policy, and international education.
Her scholarship is interdisciplinary by definition and includes Madrid as a literary invention in contemporary Spanish prose. She combines traditional literary approaches to fictional space as well as anthropological methodologies to the study of place. She has recently published "Marketing Madrid in Pérez-Reverte’s La tabla de Flandes" in Letras Peninsulares. Urban Imaginaries and "Recasting Madrid and Its Characters in Muñoz Molina's Los misterios de Madrid" is forthcoming in Hispania (2009). Adding to her focus on Spain's Castilian capital, her English translation of the short story "Poor Bea" by Francisco Zamora Loboch, Equatorial Guinean author and Madrid resident, recently appeared in The Grove.
She also develops materials for content-based Spanish instruction. Her publications include six co-authored college textbooks as well as over 40 scholarly articles, notes and reviews on literature, culture, and foreign language education and policy. She is the co-author of Nexos: Introductory Spanish 1/e (Houghton Mifflin 2005), Pueblos Intermediate Spanish in Cultural Contexts (Houghton Mifflin 2007), Nexos Media Edition (Houghton Mifflin 2007) and Nexos: Introductory Spanish 2/e (Heinle Cengage 2010).
Since 2006, she has been the Editor of Foreign Language Annals, the official journal of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) has recently announced that she has been named the incoming Editor of Hispania– A Journal Devoted to the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese to begin in 2010.
Professor Long was elected to terms on the fifteen-member Board of Directors of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the Board of Directors of the Southern Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. In 2007, The College Board and the Educational Policy Improvement Center named her to the six-member panel as a World Languages Best Practices Commission Member for Spanish Literature. She will begin a term on the Executive Council of the AATSP in 2010.
She is an awarding winning professor and has received six awards from her university and professional organizations, including the UAB Outstanding Woman Faculty Member (2005) as well as special recognition in international education from the Universidad de Jaén (2007). Most recently, she received the 2008 UAB Minority Health and Research Center Charles Barkley Excellence in Mentoring Award.
She is active in community and civic organizations and serves on the Board of Trustees of The Highlands School and the Sister City Commission (City of Birmingham). She is a member of the Rotary Club of Birmingham and Birmingham Committee on Foreign Relations.
Professor Long served as chairperson of the UAB Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures from 2002-2009.
