Natasha César Suárez is Associate Teaching Professor of Spanish. She has earned a grade in Hispanic Philology from the University of Havana (Cuba), and a Master in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language from the University of Alicante (Spain). She is currently working on her PhD dissertation entitled Transnational Cuba: Travel Literature and Popular Music.
Her research and teaching interests focus on twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean literatures and cultures, US Latina/o literature and culture, Spanish as Second/Foreign Language, and intersections of literature and foreign language teaching.
After several years of experience teaching in Cuba, Spain, Portugal and the United States, Natasha joined the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, with the interest in offering courses related to her research, such as “Seminar of Travel Literature in Hispanic Caribbean,” and “Introduction to US Latina/o Literature and Culture”, besides her contribution to the Spanish language classes at all levels.
As part of her professional activities, Natasha has given papers at conferences in the US, Spain, and Costa Rica. She has collaborated with the FLLITE project (Foreign Languages & the Literary in the Everyday), which is an approach aimed at creating open educational resources (OER) focused on bridging the language/literature gap still commonly found in university foreign language departments through a focus on how “the literary” and “the everyday” interact in a variety of texts.
She has worked as Assistant Editor for A History of Mexican Literatur, a comprehensive volume that examines the development of literary culture in Mexico for more than five hundreds years, edited by Cambridge University Press in 2016. Natasha is a current member of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), the Asociación para la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera (ASELE), and the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica (AILCFH).