Llorente Named as Associate Dean of CIIS

Llorente will replace Karl Schonberg as the associate dean of the Center for International and Intercultural Studies (CIIS). Schonberg has accepted the position as vice president and dean of academic affairs, effective July 1. 

“Marina will bring a passion to her work informed by her own experiences as a person who has studied and built a career abroad,” said Valerie Lehr, vice president and dean of academic affairs. “She will bring experience managing a department and an abroad program, and she will bring many years of collaborating with colleagues in departments across campus.”

Llorente arrived at St. Lawrence in 1997, after earning her doctorate in Spanish at the University of Kansas. She received St. Lawrence’s Louis and Frances Maslow Award in 2009, an award presented to the faculty member who has shown the most interest in and understanding of the education and welfare of the student body. She was awarded the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lectureship in 2012, which encourages original and continued research among St. Lawrence faculty members. In 2013, she was promoted to the rank of full professor.

Llorente is the author of two books in Spanish, Poesía en acción. Poemas críticos en la España contemporánea (Poetry in Action: Critical Poems in Contemporary Spain) and Palabra y deseo: Espacios transgresores en la poesía española, 1975-1990 (Word and Desire. Transgressive Spaces in the Poetry of Spain 1975-1990), and she has co-edited two additional books, Abuelas hispanas: desde la memoria y el recuerdo (Hispanic Grandmothers: Memories and Recollections) and Sites of Memory in Spain and Latin America: Trauma, Politics, and Resistance. Llorente has a third co-translated, co-edited volume that is expected to be published in 2017. She has also published more than ten articles, essays and interviews as well as produced a documentary. 

In addition to serving a five-year term as chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Llorente has served as the co-director of the Mellon Humanities Grant, served on the Academic Affairs Committee, and has been a board member of the Caribbean and Latin American Studies program, the European Studies program, the Film and Representation Studies program and the Gender and Sexuality Studies program.  As a teacher and administrator, she is currently directing the Spain Program for the fourth time.

“As a central element of St. Lawrence’s academic mission, the work of international and intercultural studies signals the crucial importance of integration to the broader work of liberal education in the 21^st century,” Llorente said. “My approach to leading CIIS would therefore focus on working collaboratively with faculty, staff, and administrative partners both at SLU and elsewhere to improve our off-campus study in general, increase male and science student participation, develop a more intentional, topic-driven approach to off-campus study, and foster integration, diversity, and inclusion in all areas of international and intercultural education.”