The Director of TPL:

      Vialla Hartfield-Méndez

     Professor Hartfield-Méndez has led the Spanish and Portuguese Department’s efforts to establish stronger ties with the Atlanta Hispanic community. She created a new service learning course, Spanish 317, "Writing, Context, and Community", built around student volunteer work in four programs of service to the Hispanic population. This initiative has expanded to include a component of service learning in Spanish 212, "The Hispanic World: Culture, Society, Language." Largely through her efforts, and in collaboration with the Michael C. Carlos Museum, the Department has received grants from the university’s Joint Activities Committee and the Center for Teaching and Curriculum to sponsor related events at the museum and at area schools with large Hispanic populations. In 2004 she received funding from the Research and Program Fund Institute for Comparative and International Studies (ICIS), the Office of University Partnerships (OUCP) and the Theory Practice Learning Program (TPL) to direct the Mexican Summer Cultural Immersion Program which brought together on Emory's campus Emory student interns, a graduate student Co-Director, elementary teachers from Mexico and 25 children of Hispanic heritage from Cary Reynolds Elementary School, for a month-long summer camp focused on Mexican culture, including four days at the Carlos Museum.In support of these initiatives, Professor Hartfield-Méndez has also received grants from the Office of University-Community Partnerships (OUCP), the Theory Practice Learning Program (TPL), the Institute for Comparative and International Studies (ICIS), and received support from Emory College Online (ECO). Professor Hartfield-Méndez was named Community Partnership Faculty Fellow for 2003-2004 by the OUCP and received the Community Outreach Faculty Award from ICIS. She is the Faculty Liaison and sits on the Atlanta Board of Directors for Project SHINE (Students Helping in the Naturalization of Elders), a national service-learning project administered in Atlanta through Emory and Georgia Perimeter College. Professor Hartfield-Méndez completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Southern Mississippi. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Virginia and studied literature and linguistics at the University of Salamanca, Spain. She previously taught at Vassar College and Drew University. Professor Hartfield-Méndez is the author of Woman and the Infinite: Epiphanic Moments in Pedro Salinas’s Art (Bucknell University Press). She has published articles and book reviews on twentieth-century Spanish poetry and narrative in such journals as Hispanic Review, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and Anales de la literature española contemporánea. She has also served on the editorial board of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and as coeditor of the review section of the same journal. In addition to theory practice learning, her recent research and teaching interests include the writing and rewriting of history in Spain and Latin America, and the literary and cultural productions of Hispanic societies in civil conflict.