News Release| Department of Modern Languages and Literatures; Cal State L.A.

March 21, 2013

Cal State L.A. professor to be inducted into North American Academy of the Spanish Language

Los Angeles, CA – Domnita Dumitrescu, professor emerita of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at California State University, Los Angeles, will be inducted as a Numerary Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) under the sponsorship of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC) of New York University.

The induction ceremony will take place Friday, March 29, 7 p.m., at KJCC, which is located at 53 Washington Square South in New York. The inductees will be presented by Secretary of the Academy Jorge Covarrubias, and the traditional response will be delivered by ANLE Director Gerardo Piña-Rosales.

As part of the honor, Dumitrescu will give an address, entitled “La alternancia de códigos en la literature hispanounidense: cómo, cuándo y por qué (Code switching in Hispanic Literature in the United States: How, When and Why).” She will also be named a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid, Spain.

After the ceremony, Dumitrescu and co-editor Gerardo Piña-Rosales will present their new book, El español en los Estados Unidos: E Pluribus Unum? Enfoques multidisciplinarios (Spanish Language in the United States: E Pluribus Unum? Multidisciplinary Approaches), which is published by ANLE.

Dumitrescu, who received her Ph.D. from USC, is an expert in Spanish language and linguistics, with emphasis on the pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects of the Spanish-speaking world. She is also knowledgeable in contrastive analysis of Spanish, English and French, and in Romanian language from a Romance comparative perspective.

She is active in several professional organizations, having been listed in the most recent editions of Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, Who’s Who of American Women, and 2000 Outstanding Scholars of the 20th Century. An author of six books, she is also a frequent contributor to scholarly journals in the U.S., Mexico, Argentina and Europe.

Dumitrescu received the CSULA President’s Distinguished Professor Award in 2008 and the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) Teacher of the Year Award in 2000. She served as president of the Southern California Chapter of the AATSP (1992-94), and has been an associate editor of Hispania, the association’s scholarly journal, since 1996. She also serves as honorary president of the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society Sigma Delta Pi. Dumitrescu was a Fulbright Scholar to Argentina in fall 1993, and she served as president of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest in 2005. In addition to Romanian, her native language, she is fluent in Spanish, English and French.

She is a resident of Glendale, CA.

The North American Academy of the Spanish Language is one of the 22 academies of the Spanish language in three continents, is a non-profit corporation, founded in 1973. Its mission is to promote the proper use of the Spanish language in the United States. It is officially recognized by GSA as the maximum authority in the field of Spanish language in this country.

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