Alba Arias Álvarez
Bio
I was born and raised in Grao, Asturias. If you have not visited Asturias yet, believe me, you are missing an extraordinary sight:
Pre-Romanesque art, deep blue Cantabrian sea, St. James way (Camino de Santiago), green valleys, Picos de Europa. I live in the diaspora but my ties to Asturias are strong.
Education
I attended the University of Oviedo for my bachelor's degree, where I studied Spanish philology. I completed two masters at the University of Oviedo and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on Spanish phonetics and sociolinguistics.
My Ph.D. research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst combined auditory and acoustic analysis to study acoustic data on onset /r/ in Puerto Rican Spanish in Holyoke, MA, the city with the largest per capita population of Puerto Ricans living outside the island of Puerto Rico. The aim of this dissertation was to analyze whether there is trill variation in the Puerto Rican community in Holyoke, and whether it mirrors the variation found in Puerto Rico. Special attention was paid to glottal, velar, or uvular /r/ realizations. This project contributes not only to the body of research on changes in progress in the diaspora, but also to the literature on Puerto Rican Spanish phonology in the United States.
Employment
After working for six years as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I was an Assistant Professor in Hispanic Linguistics at Roanoke College, in Salem VA. There, I taught a variety of Spanish and linguistic courses, such as Sociolinguistics, Hispanic Linguistics, and Spanish Phonetics and Phonology. Later, I moved to Spain and I spent two years as a "María Zambrano" Research Scholar at the University of Alcalá.
I am currently a Lecturer in Spanish and Linguistics at the University of Sussex. I focus on language contact situations, linguistic attitudes and identity, and the linguistic landscape.
