This Public Symposium Features
Invited speakers will address bilingual education, immigration, labor, linguistic landscapes, community outreach, health equity, and more.
This symposium creates a space for dialogue about the social, cultural, linguistic, and public health dimensions of this transformation. Students, faculty, and community members are welcome.
Presentations will be delivered in English, with opportunities for questions in English and/or Spanish. Talks will be filmed. Remote participation available via Zoom.
Speakers
Stephen Fafulas
Associate Professor, University of Mississippi
A co-founder of the SEC Spanish Consortium, which promotes cross-disciplinary scholarship and cross-institutional collaborations aimed at documenting newly-established Latinx communities in the U.S. South. He is the director of the SoCIOLing (Study of Communities, Involvement & Outreach and Linguistics) Lab through which he mentors students and leads a number of research initiatives with bilingual communities globally.
Justin Pinta
Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics, Mississippi State University
A sociolinguist specializing in language contact between Spanish and indigenous
languages of the Americas. His work addresses the relationship between sociolinguistic factors,
linguistic change, and language transmission.
Mark Amengual
Professor and Chair of the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz
His research centers on experimental phonetics and bilingualism, with an emphasis on how multilingual speakers acquire, represent, and produce speech across languages. Combining laboratory experiments with large-scale corpus methods, his work explores phonetic variation, cross-linguistic influence, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying bilingual and multilingual speech.
Monique Henderson
Director, English Learners Engage
The owner and director of English Learners
Engage, Mississippi’s only multilingual learner-focused consulting company. She served as Director of Special Populations at the Mississippi Department of Education. She has authored two books, including 31 Things Your English Learners Want You to Know: Lessons from the Classroom.
Angela Stuesse
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Her book, Scratching Out a Living, explores how the Mississippi poultry industry’s
cultivation of a precarious labor force has transformed communities and prospects for worker organizing. Her current project, #FreeDany, explores US immigration policy across the twenty-first century through the life story of one Mississippi Dreamer.
Diana Ruggiero
Professor of Spanish, University of Memphis
An engaged scholar recognized by her professional peers worldwide for her contributions to scholarship and teaching in world languages for specific purposes (WLSP) and Spanish language and culture, her current teaching and research focus is on WLSP pedagogy, Spanish for healthcare, and the Latinx Community in Memphis.
John T. Edge
Director MS Lab, Founding Director SFA, and Writer in Residence, University of Mississippi
John writes and hosts the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SEC Network and ESPN and streams via Hulu. He’s at work on a memoir, House of Smoke, was published in the fall of 2025. His book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, was named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and a host of others.
Tom Lewis
Assistant Professor, Tougaloo College
An interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on understanding the role of linguistic ideologies in reflecting and reproducing systemic inequalities. His book, titled Linguistic White Privilege: Raciolinguistic Ideologies in the Gulf South, is expected in December 2026.
Chad Howe
Professor of Hispanic Linguistics, University of Georgia
His research explores language variation, change, and structural evolution in Romance languages, including work digitizing Quechua texts and applying NLP to questions of authorship and Indigenous representation. His cross-disciplinary collaborations, including social-media-based language change studies and international research partnerships, advance both linguistic scholarship and digital humanities. He also serves as the Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute.
Abigail Walker
Student, University of Mississippi
Abigail is pursuing a major in International
Studies and Spanish through the Croft Institute, with a minor in Chemistry on the pre-med track. Her engagement with the Latino community of Mississippi includes serving as a bilingual tutor at Della Davidson Elementary and her interviews and fieldwork in Honor’s 420: Latinos in Mississippi.
Alan Florian
Student, University of Mississippi
An American Guatemalan from Hazlehurst, Mississippi. He is currently a first-generation college student at the University of Mississippi majoring in Finance. His early exposure to the Finance industry, like many others, was through the stock market, which ultimately led to his decision in declaring his search for a B.B.A in Finance.
Remote participation available via Zoom
Dan O’Sullivan
Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages, University of Mississippi
Dan teaches a wide variety of courses in French language, literature, and linguistics. His research is primarily in medieval vernacular song and songbooks. As Department Chair, he leads one of the largest departments at the university with nearly seventy full-time faculty members and oversees a curriculum including thirteen languages plus theoretical and applied linguistics in English.
Eduardo Prieto
Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management, University of Mississippi
A higher education veteran with more than 30 years of expertise and experience working at both public and private universities. He is a member of several civic and professional organizations, in addition to sitting on a handful of national advisory boards. Prieto serves on the University’s senior leadership team and oversees the Division of Enrollment Management.
Dan Jones
Former Chancelor, University of Mississippi
A global medical humanitarian and activist for social justice, especially health care access. Over a long and diverse career, he has served as a physician, medical missionary, medical school professor and dean, medical researcher, and university chancellor. In his community of Hazlehurst, MS, Jones serves on the local hospital board and public school board.
Ivan Ortega Santos
Professor of Hispanic Linguistics, University of Memphis
His research focuses on syntax, educational interpreting and U.S. Spanish. He is the director of the Corpus of Memphis Spanish and the creator of Snakes and Ladders: The Spanish of the U.S., a gamified introduction to U.S. Spanish.
Maria Jose Barrera
Student, University of Mississippi
A proud member of Mississippi’s Hispanic community, Barrera is a bilingual tutor for students at Oxford High School and serves as an ambassador for the Student Health Coalition of Oxford. She is also part of the Catholic Campus Ministry where she leads Spanish discussion groups to support bilingual engagement.
Conference Program
08:30-09:20 AM
Breakfast at Circle and Square, Next to the Depot
Please register so that we prepare enough meal
10:30-11:00 AM
Multilingual Mississippi and Emergent Sociolinguistic Complexity: The Case of Mayan Languages, Spanish, and English
Justin Pinta
11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Workshop - Working with English Learners in Mississippi
and throughout the Deep South
Monique Henderson
09:30-10:30 AM
Opening Remarks
Stephen Fafulas, Dan O’Sullivan, Eduardo Prieto, John T. Edge, Dan Jones, Alan Florian
12:00-01:00 PM
Lunch
Please register so that we prepare enough meal
01:00-01:30 PM
Building a Large-scale, Open-access, Bilingual Corpus:
The Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California (MuHSiC) Corpus
Mark Amengual
01:30-02:00 PM
Beyond Language: Reframing Needs Assessment and Psychoeducation in LSP for Heritage Learners and Latinos in the South
Diana Ruggiero
02:00-03:00 PM
Keynote Address - Scratching Out a Living: How the Poultry Industry’s ‘Hispanic Project’ Transformed Mississippi
Angela Stuesse
03:00-03:30 PM
Growing Up Bilingual in the Greater Memphis Area
Ivan Ortega Santos
03:30-04:00 PM
Reproducing Raciolinguistic Ideologies:
The Contested Role of Spanish in MS
Tom Lewis
04:00-04:30 PM
Exploring the Past, Present and Future of Latino Communities in Mississippi through an Experiential Learning Course
Stephen Fafulas, Maria Jose Barrera, Abigail Walker
05:30-07:00 PM
South Talks - Portraits of Belonging:
Latino Life and Legacy in Mississippi
Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Barnard Observatory
Come as your schedule permits
The Depot,
University of Mississippi
101 Depot St, Oxford, MS 38655
Build in 1872 by the Mississippi Central R.R. (later part of the Illinois Central line), the depot was a hub of activity for the town and the University of Mississippi. Passenger service ended in 1941. The depot was restored in 2003 and now serves as a place where students, locals, and visitors can gather. It stands ready to watch over Oxford and the University into the next century and beyond.
Made possible through generous support from
the University of Mississippi Faculty Laureates Program
Special Event
South Talks
Portraits of Belonging:
Latino Life and Legacy in Mississippi
05:30-07:00 PM
Center for the Study of Southern Culture, Barnard Observatory