Keynote Speakers

Maria M. Carreira (California State University)

Maria M. Carreira currently serves as the Executive Director of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (aatsp.org). She is Emerita Professor of Spanish linguistics at California State University, Long Beach and a co-founder and Emerita co-director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. Most recently, she has served on the ACTFL Board and co-created The Heritage Language Exchange (HLXchange.com), a site for and by teachers of heritage languages. She is the 2023 recipient of the Charles Fergusson Award for Outstanding Research, given by the Center for Applied Linguistics. She has published extensively on U.S. Spanish, immigrant languages, and on heritage language pedagogy, and is a co-author of four college-level Spanish textbooks as well as being a co-author of Voces: Latino Students on Life in the United States. Professor Carreira has a B.S. in Math and Computer Science from Loyola University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Born in Cuba and immigrating first to Spain and then to the United States at the age of 11, Carreira is a heritage speaker of Spanish.

Danny Erker (Boston University)

Danny Erker is Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Boston University. He is the director of the Spanish in Boston Project, a National Science Foundation-funded research initiative studying the sociolinguistic behavior of Spanish-speaking Bostonians. Erker has published research in several leading journals (including Language, Lingua, Language Variation and Change, and Language in Society), and his work has been featured in the Boston Globe, TedX, and on NPR. His research investigates a broad array of language phenomena, ranging from microlinguistic variation in speech sounds to macrolinguistic trends such as the intergenerational maintenance of immigrant languages.

Maria Polinsky (University of Maryland)

Maria Polinsky is a professor of Linguistics and Associate Director of the Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. At UMD, she founded the Guatemala Field Station whish she directs. Her research interests include syntactic theory and its application to cross-linguistic variation. Polinsky has been a pioneer of heritage language study and has played an active role in introducing heritage languages into modern linguistic theory. Her book “Heritage Language and Their Speakers”, an introduction to the field of heritage language studies, appeared in 2018 from Cambridge University Press. She is a co-editor of the “Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics” (2021, 2024) and she is the director of the National Heritage Language Research Center at UCLA.

Rajiv Rao (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Rajiv Rao is a Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also currently serving as the Director of the Language Sciences Program. His research program, primarily centered on varieties of Spanish, focuses on segmental and suprasegmental issues as they pertain to bilingualism (mainly heritage speakers, but also L2 learners), sociolinguistics, language contact, and interfaces with pragmatics and syntax. He has edited three volumes – Key Issues in the Teaching of Spanish Pronunciation (2019; Routledge), Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact (2020; John Benjamins), and The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages (2024; Cambridge University Press) – and has co-authored a Spanish phonetics textbook – Pronunciaciones del español (2022; Routledge). He serves as the editor-in-chief of the Heritage Language Journal.