Francisca Aguiló Mora

I joined the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2016. I hold a Ph.D. with distinction in Romance Studies from the University of Miami, where I specialized in Cultural (Latinx) Studies, Sociolinguistics, and Second Language Acquisition and received the Dean’s Academic Year Dissertation Award. Originally from Mallorca, Spain, I majored in English Studies at the Universitat de Barcelona and studied abroad at the University of Southampton. I also earned a Diploma of Advanced Studies (DEA), with Honors, in Comparative Literature from the Universitat de les Illes Balears.

Since Fall 2025, I have served as the Director of the Spanish Language Program. In this role, I dedicate my energy to guiding students throughout their Spanish-language journey, welcoming them to Casa Hispánica, and building a community with colleagues where excellence in teaching and learning is fostered alongside diverse perspectives and collegiality.

My research focuses on three principal areas:

  • Climate humanities and language teaching and learning;
  • The sociolinguistic, literary, and ideological aspects of Spanish in the U.S. and heritage language teaching;
  • Spanish second language acquisition from the perspective of sociocultural theory.

This work has been supported by various grants and scholarships awarded by Columbia University’s College of Arts and Sciences, Columbia’s Language Resource Center, Columbia’s Division of Humanities, the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, among others.

The classroom is where my research comes to life—my creative and intellectual space, where I feel most at home, away from home. As a Senior Lecturer in Spanish, I see myself as a lifelong learner, viewing every class as an opportunity for growth, intellectual exchange, and discovery. I foster students’ motivation by attending to the affective dimensions of learning and promoting critical thinking, reflection, inquiry-based research, writing, and collaboration.

My teaching philosophy is grounded in contextualization and critical pedagogy. I understand language as inseparable from its social, historical, cultural, ideological, and environmental contexts, and I create learning environments where diverse perspectives are integral to the classroom. Students engage with Spanish in its many varieties while developing an awareness of language ideologies, its colonial history and global reach, regional diversity, and voices historically marginalized by standardized approaches. By situating language within broader contexts, students explore how it both reflects and shapes the worlds in which we live, learning to read between the lines and engage with deeper meanings, intertextuality, and cultural framing.

I also develop concept-based pedagogies for second- and heritage-language learners, bringing research into conversation with classroom practice and using verbal and graphic representations as tools for thinking and meaning-making. I am deeply committed to teacher training, bringing these principles into my work with future language educators.

Ultimately, I want students to leave my classroom having critically reflected on how Spanish-speaking cultures and societies shape language use—and how language, in turn, shapes the ways we understand the world. My goal is not only for students to develop linguistic proficiency but also to enjoy the process, cultivate a genuine love for the language, and make meaningful connections between what they learn in class, their other courses, and the world beyond the classroom.

All of these classroom applications are informed by and in dialogue with my published research. A selection of relevant publications follows:

Monograph

Aguiló Mora, Francisca and Almudena Marín Cobos. The Climate Turn in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026. Print. Elements in Language Teaching. 

Selected Articles

Aguiló Mora, Francisca, and Almudena Marín Cobos. “Climate Humanities in the L2 Classroom: Radical Possibilities for an Uncertain Future.” Radical Teacher 131 (2025): 37-48. https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2024.1273. 🔔This article was awarded with the NECTFL 2026’s Stephen A. Freeman Award for best published research article on language teaching and learning.

Marín Cobos, Almudena, and Francisca Aguiló Mora. “Humanidades medioambientales en la clase de L2/LH: un enfoque transdisciplinar.” EDUNOVATIC 2025 Conference Proceedings: 10th Virtual International Conference on Education, Innovation and ICT, edited by REDINE, Adaya Press, 2025, pp. 216–220.

Gondra, Ager, and Francisca Aguiló Mora. “How Do We Flip the Classroom? Reassessing the Flipped Method.” Journal of Formative Design in Learning, vol. 8, 2024, pp. 33–46.

Santos de Souza, Lívia, and Francisca Aguiló Mora. “La enseñanza de español como lengua de herencia en Estados Unidos: posibles contribuciones para la realidad brasileña.” Revista Leia Escola, vol. 24, no. 4, 2024, pp. 236–247.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca. “Conceptualizing Language and Gender in the Global Urban Context: Jennine Capó Crucet on How to (Never) Leave Hialeah.” CiberLetras: Journal of Literary Criticism and Culture, no. 49, 2023, pp. 1–19.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca, and Eduardo Negueruela-Azarola. “Teaching Thinking-for-Speaking in the L2 Classroom: A Mindful Conceptual Engagement Approach to Teaching Directions and Motion Events.” Frontiers in Communication, vol. 7, 2022.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca. “Ana Lydia Vega’s ‘Pollito chicken’: The Impossible Spanglish.” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2018, pp. 132–151.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca. “La imposibilidad del Spanglish en ‘Pollito chicken’ de Ana Lydia Vega.” Revista Glosas, ANLE, vol. 9, no. 5, 2018, pp. 11–27.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca. “Lengua(je)s, branding, e identidad en la Gran Cuba: Dreaming in Cuban de Cristina García.” Revista Valenciana. Estudios de filosofía y letras, vol. 22, 2018, pp. 217–258.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca, and Andrew Lynch. “¿Hablas castellano? Do you speak English? o Xerres mallorquí? Ideologías y actitudes lingüísticas en Mallorca en una era de crisis económica.” Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, vol. 10, no. 2, 2017, pp. 189–223.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca. “Memory Mambo de Achy Obejas: un paso adelante más allá del guion.” Letras Femeninas, vol. 42, no. 1, 2016, pp. 159–178. 

Selected Book Chapters

Marín Cobos, Almudena, and Francisca Aguiló Mora. “El discurso climático en la clase de español: reflexiones teóricas y dilemas éticos.” In Sujetos y discursos: ideologías y reivindicaciones en la cultura y la educación contemporánea, edited by Teresa Fernández Ulloa and Carlos Enrique Ahuactzin Martínez, California State University, Bakersfield, and Instituto de Ciencias de Gobierno y Desarrollo Estratégico, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2024, pp. 229–238.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca. “Lenguas cruzadas sobre el papel: la literatura multilingüe en el aula de español L2/LH.” In Cultura e interculturalidad en las clases de lengua y literatura española e hispanoamericana, edited by Teresa Fernández Ulloa and Miguel Soler Gallo, Peter Lang Verlag, 2024, pp. 37–45.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca, and Magnolia Negrete Cetina. “El método genético en la investigación sociocultural.” In Teoría sociocultural y español L2/LE, edited by Eduardo Negueruela-Azarola, Próspero García, and Arturo Escandón, Routledge, 2023, pp. 189–206.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca, and Andrew Lynch. “La literatura latina estadounidense en el aula del español como lengua de herencia.” In Aproximaciones al estudio del español como lengua de herencia, edited by Diego Pascual y Cabo and Julio Torres, Routledge, 2021, pp. 178–189.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca, and Eduardo Negueruela Azarola. “Motion for the Other Through Motion for the Self: The Conceptual Complexities of Giving-Directions for Advanced Spanish Heritage Learners.” In Cognitive Linguistics and Sociocultural Theory: Applications for Second and Foreign Language Teaching, edited by Kyoko Masuda, Carlee Arnett, and Angela Labarca, Mouton De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 73–100.

Aguiló Mora, Francisca. “Welcome to Miami/Bienvenidos a Miami.” In Dexter: ética y estética de un asesino en serie, edited by Patricia Trapero, Editorial Laertes – Edicions UIB, 2010, pp. 183–202.