Meet CAT Assistant Director Dr. Karen Spira

After earning her B.A. from Brown University in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies, Karen spent five years as a bilingual elementary school teacher in the Los Angeles public schools, then completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2013, she joined the faculty of Guilford College as a Spanish professor. First as Assistant Professor and since 2020 as Associate Professor of Spanish, she rebuilt the Spanish curriculum around experiential learning, faculty-led study abroad, and high-impact practices such as collaborative project-based learning. Over the last 12 years at Guilford, she has won teaching and advising awards and acted as a pedagogical leader on campus, facilitating learning communities, reading groups, and workshops for her colleagues.

Karen specializes in Latin American fiction, and her scholarly projects investigate how authors mobilize literary technique to intervene in pressing social issues. Whether teaching introductory Spanish, advanced seminars like Resistance and Revolution in Latin America, or short-term study abroad courses, she has been eager to incorporate community-engaged, experiential pedagogy. Her Spanish students assisted in facilitating “Café con libros,” a bilingual book club they created in partnership with the Greensboro Public Library, while those in her Mexican Childhoods course traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico to live with a host family and learn about experiences of childhood through interacting with children representing diverse ethnic and socioeconomic groups. 

Karen also explores the transformative potential of the traditional classroom and experiments with radically student-centered modalities. For example, students in her Contemporary Latin America course worked to build their own public-facing website, profiling the lives of youth from different parts of Latin America, following engagement with their stories through film, journalism, and testimonial texts in class. Class discussions of these sources were themselves often student-led.

Karen’s presence in the CAT will expand our capacity to offer personalized teaching consultations and classroom observations while developing new programs aligned with her expertise in inclusive pedagogy and experiential learning. She will also teach undergraduate courses as a jointly appointed Part-Time Professor of Spanish.