Hello! I'm Gabi/Gabby (both spellings work) and my pronouns are she/her/hers in English, ella in Spanish, and ea/ei in Romanian.

 

A bit about my personal background

I grew up in Bucharest, Romania, lived in Bremen, Germany, and have been residing in the United States for the past nine years. Therefore, in the last decade I have been an immigrant to two different nations which has painted my understanding of belonging. While recognizing the immigrant-specific struggles I have experienced, I also acknowledge my privilege of having faced them as a white cis-woman with no visible disabilities.
 

I am multilingual; I speak Romanian, Spanish, and English fluently, and can also get by in German and French. Importantly, I am a multilingual speaker whose language competency in Romanian, Spanish, and English affords me the ability to ‘pass’ as a ‘native’ speaker. The possibility of ‘opting out’ and not being othered as a ‘non-native’ speaker has been guiding my research in language attitudes, stereotyping, and discrimination for the past years.

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A bit about my professional and academic background

I am Assistant Director of Online and Digital Pedagogy at Drexel University's Teaching and Learning Center.

I am also currently a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, completing a doctorate in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. My dissertation (to be defended in November 2024) focuses on learners' and teachers' attitudes toward different linguistic varieties of Spanish. I have an MA in Applied Linguistics from Teachers College, Columbia University, an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish from New York University, and a BA in Integrated Cultural Studies from Jacobs University, Bremen.

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