Each year, the College of Liberal Arts selects a successful graduate to return to campus to share career and personal experience with students and faculty on what it took to get where they are.
Upcoming Lectures
March 17, 2022 at 3 p.m. CST
David L. Rice Library, Room 017
In her talk, Heather will speak about her years at USI, along with how her time as a Spanish major in the World Languages and Cultures department assisted her in cultivating and developing her passion for languages and linguistics within the liberal arts. She will further address how USI courses and faculty prepared her for her graduate school career and discovering her areas of expertise in phonetics, phonology and second language acquisition.
Heather Offerman graduated from USI in 2009 as a Spanish major and psychology minor. Heather went on to teach Spanish courses and complete her Master’s (2014) and PhD (2020) degrees in Spanish Linguistics at Purdue University, with a two-year contract in between both degrees teaching Spanish and English courses at a university in China (2015-2017). She is now at Davidson College in North Carolina as the Lower Division Coordinator and a lecturer of Hispanic Studies. Her research focuses on phonetics, phonology, second language pronunciation teaching, second language acquisition, and curriculum development.
In her time at USI, she enjoyed taking an array of literature courses from Dr. Hitchcock and Dr. Huerta, as well as grammar and history with Dr. Latorre, which helped to broaden her worldview and philosophically challenge her way of thinking. She eventually found her love of linguistics taking a course in Spanish Diction with Dr. Rosas Mayén her senior year. The faculty at USI were crucial to her success in her career through their support and encouragement of graduate school and of her endeavors to become a professor. "
View a list of past speakers >>
Alumna Izumi Greubel M'94 was the first instructor of Japanese language classes at USI in the '90s. She returned to USI after about 12 years to promote her new book as a part of the Alumni-in-Residence program. She and husband Tony Greubel also spoke with Global Studies classes about their lives in foreign service.
Alumni-turned-Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Apia, Samoa, Tony Greubel '92, visited USI for our Alumni-in-Residence program. Political Science student Cameron Davidson sat down for an interview with Tony.
