Jared White

Biography

Not a day goes by that I do not speak, read, or write in Spanish. As the official language used in twenty countries and spoken by more than 550 million people around the globe, I feel incredibly blessed to share my knowledge and expertise of the Spanish language and the cultures that speak it. Some of my favorite teaching moments derive from genuine learning opportunities both inside and outside the classroom. From community engagement and school visits to conversational practice and textual analysis, I strive to create authentic experiences that challenge my students to express themselves in a foreign language, allow them to appreciate new cultures and traditions, and enable them to think critically and coherently about our multilingual world and its citizens.

To better provide educational service opportunities for my students, I cofounded a puppetry troupe, Dragoncillo, in 2018. Through Dragoncillo, we have partnered with our students to present informative outreach performances at K-12 schools, universities, and theater festivals throughout the United States and abroad. During these performances, we use imaginative, bilingual storytelling to both educate and entertain. The Dragoncillo project and the unique community-engagement experiences it has fostered have been a highlight of my career thus far.

As a scholar, I am consistently drawn to Spanish theater. Although I specialize in early modern Iberia, I have also studied and written about Spain’s nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In my research, I consider Spanish theater as a collective whole or, to borrow an idea from José Ortega y Gasset, a dramatic vertebral column that stretches far back into the Middle Ages and extends well into the twenty-first century. This itinerant approach to research, while centered on theatrical works, has enabled me to publish research from diverse periods of time: from medieval romances and the Golden Age comedia to modern dramatic forms such as Valle-Inclán’s esperpento and Buero Vallejo’s posibilismo.

When I’m not teaching, researching, or acting, you can find me watching sports (most likely soccer or basketball), reading a good book, or spending time with my wife, Emily, and our five children: Maxwell, Sean, Dylan, Rory, and Samantha.