Megan Echevarría began the role of Faculty Athletics Representative in July of 2021. A professor of Spanish and Film Media Studies, she earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She specializes in Spanish literary, cultural, and film studies, with keen interest in education, social justice, and interculturality.
Dr. Echevarría has extensive experience and enjoys teaching across the entire spectrum of the curriculum. As a teacher-scholar, her writing and presentations shed light on the critical and central role of the humanities —literature in particular— at all levels of language programs and in innovative interdisciplinary curricula. Her humanistic research focuses primarily on narrative and film.
Dr. Echevarría’s professional dexterity and scholarly versatility are evident both in the leadership roles for which she has been selected over the course of her career, as well as in her research. Her work coordinating the beginning and intermediate Spanish program at URI led logically to important contributions to multiple beginning and intermediate Spanish textbooks. Serving as Director of the Spanish International Engineering Program for six years and her sustained involvement with that award-winning program since then led not only to her successful 100,000 Strong in the Americas grant proposal but also to publications and presentations in the areas of interdisciplinary teaching and global program direction and development.
Passion for literature, culture and film has remained constant throughout her career and is evident in her teaching and her scholarship. Echevarría’s upcoming edited volume Rehumanizing the Languages and Literatures Curriculum (Peter Lang) represents the culmination of over a decade of her work on proficiency-oriented language and literature education and brings together new research by some of the most eminent scholars in this field. During the entire 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Echevarría is on sabbatical in order to devote all of her attention to her next book in which she is examining issues related to diversity and social justice in Spanish literature for children and young adults.
updated 7/25/2021
