Gabriela Capraroiu Gabriela Capraroiu, Assistant Professor of Spanish, lived and taught in Quito, Ecuador, for seven and a half years before moving to California. She speaks three languages including Spanish and Romanian, her native tongue. Her warm accent echoes her family heritage. As a native of Romania she grew up loving the complexity of language and decided to specialize in English and Spanish during her junior year of high school. To gain admittance into college she had to choose two modern languages. She was in search of a second language after learning both English and French, and chose Spanish, a language that was beginning to gain recognition in her country. Her first choice had been Greek, but she had to give it up because it was considered a classical rather than a modern language. She earned her B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest. Her cultural and world perspectives allowed her to explore a love for people, history, and language. “What is it … about traveling?” she says. “It opens your eyes to ways of life that are different. When you live in one place you tend to think that it’s the center and everywhere else is the same. But once you step out of that space, you know that’s not true. It’s a test of our ability to adapt to other worlds and I like that.” She has not only been a tourist, but a resident in almost every destination. And every adventure has proved worthwhile. “I don’t like every food I try and I don't make every new custom my own, but I don’t mind going through the experience,” she says. It was through a teaching fellowship at San Francisco State University, where she received her M.A., that her teaching at the college level began. It continued through her studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. “I don’t think I chose teaching without foreign languages; in my case, they went hand in hand,” Capraroiu says. “The dialogue with students, highly stimulating, is also a complement to research, which can be, at times, a more solitary kind of work.” Her present research deals with the literary space in which Latin American, Spanish, and European writers produced part of their work during the interwar years, at the crossroads of ideological shifts and a vision about art that went beyond political distinctions. She is currently preparing new courses on contemporary Spanish narrative and film; and she is also working with Chilean poet Omar Lara on a Spanish translation of Romanian poet Lucian Blaga (1895-1961). “Blaga is one of the most significant modern Romanian poets,” she says. "Like other poetry written at different times and in different languages, Blaga's poems often speak of our pursuit of that which we cannot attain, a pursuit that becomes our path in life." Her travels have taught her to explore and embrace realities beyond her own, something she wishes to share with students. She has begun to work on the development of new study abroad programs, both in South America and Spain. “Through the knowledge of a foreign language, we try to understand others and ourselves," Capraroiu says. "When we study a foreign language we often reflect on our own; that is, we go back to our culture. The teaching of foreign languages and literatures strikes me as a wonderful way of entering into a dialogue with the traditions of the past and the changes of the present that affect us." RETURN TO FACULTY LISTHome.htmlshapeimage_2_link_0