Aaron R. Boalick

Aaron Boalick (he/him/his) holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures, with a specialization in Contemporary Peninsular Cultural Studies, from the University of Michigan, and a MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University. He has over a decade of experience teaching a broad range of courses, from Spanish and French Languages to Film, Literary, and Cultural Studies, at a diverse set of institutions of higher learning. He joined Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures as a Visiting Lecturer during the 2021-2022 academic year and became Lecturer in Discipline in Spanish in 2023.

Outside of academe, Aaron has worked with tech companies, developing new media tools for second language acquisition, and is a film critic. He is passionate about the potential of a range of new media to improve outcomes for second language learning and is committed to building student literacy skills (conceived broadly, from the written word to cultural and visual literacies) across the curriculum.

Aaron thinks of the ideal foreign language classroom as something of a total inversion of the tutor-pupil model popularized by My Fair Lady, in which an authoritarian teacher benevolently transmits speech downward to a humble student. Rather, the greatest potential for language acquisition derives from the cultivation of a strong community of learners, actively committed to advancing their knowledge and contributing to that of their peers, guided by an instructor capable of recognizing and responding to their collective and individual needs.