PRESIDENT’S AWARD FOR TEACHING EXCELLENCE

2021 President’s Award for Teaching Excellence

Rafaela Fiore Urízar, PhD

Rafaela Fiore Urízar, chair of the Department of Languages and Cultures and associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, received the 2021 President’s Award for Teaching Excellence. The award was created in 1995 to recognize professors who are held in high esteem by their peers, students and the rest of the university community.

Fiore Urízar received her BA in literature from Universidad Católica “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción” in Paraguay; her MA in Spanish languages and literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and her PhD in contemporary Latin American literature from the University of Chicago.

A native of Paraguay, she is an energetic and interesting professor who, in her decade at Cal Lutheran, has shared her passion for literature, prompting many of her students to pursue advanced studies of Spanish and Latin American culture.

“It is clear that Dr. Rafaela Fiore Urízar is an inspirational and transformative teacher who personifies excellence in teaching,” President Lori E. Varlotta said in an online video for the virtual 2021 Honors Recognition. She guides students majoring in Spanish in developing research projects, submitting them to conferences and presenting them. She also helps students showcase their research in applications for graduate programs and employment.

The Thousand Oaks resident co-developed two interdisciplinary travel seminars. She taught “Treasures of Peru” with a history professor and “Barcelona Through the Looking Glass” with a mathematics professor. She also has helped students find internships in areas that interest them, such as with the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project in Oxnard and Thousand Oaks’ Glenwood Elementary School, where 95% of the students are Spanish-speaking. Fiore Urízar mentored Marina Álvarez, a Simi Valley resident who graduated in 2015 with majors in Spanish and global studies, in studying Latina graffiti artists in Los Angeles and publishing her findings in a peer-reviewed cultural studies journal. Álvarez earned a master’s in Latin American studies at Loyola University Chicago and a second master’s in museum and exhibition studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and served as a 2019 Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Fellow. Fiore Urízar, who gave her acceptance speech in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Guarani, said she hopes students leave Cal Lutheran “with a greater sense of wonder and a desire to inquire and to value knowledge for its own sake.”