Hamid Bahri is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies. He also serves as Study Abroad Advisor. He teaches literatures and cultures of the Francophone world as well as elementary French classes. His research interests span the postcolonial North Africa and the Arab world, translation, cultural studies and film. He is currently examining the theme of ethnicities, race and the myth of origin in North Africa.

It is crucial to me to weave together the 3 strands of my YC career: teaching, scholarship, service. I strive to engage students in the 25+ courses in Spanish, ESL, Hum., World Lit & Cultural Diversity courses I have taught. My research leads to curricular revisions & innovations.  Nowhere is the overlap of classroom-library-community as clear as in Translation. My experiences (translator for Avis,Garden City; legal interpreter in Providence, RI; ongoing pro-bono translator for my parish & for adoptive parents;interpreter for the Mineola School District), connect to my teaching & to my many published translations. In the 1990's the OAA subsidized a student-staffed Spanish translation service which I directed. Students translated documents for individuals & for entities including YAI & Jamaica Hospital. Classroom theory & practice came alive as students gained career experience & contributed to the community.

Margarita Drago is originally from Argentina. As an ex-political prisoner and writer she has represented Argentina in congresses in the United States, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Honduras and France. She has published articles in newspapers and literary, educational, and human rights magazines as well as articles on pedagogy of teaching children. She has also published chapters from her doctoral dissertation: Sister María de Jesús Tomelín (1579-1637), Conceptionist from Puebla de Los Ángeles: A Failed Construction of a Saint. In 2007 Editorial Campana published her memoirs from prison: Memory Tracks: Fragments from Prison (1975-1980) which recounts her memories as an Argentinean political prisoner from 1975 to 1980. Excerpts from her book and poems have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines. Since its publication, Dr. Drago has been invited to national and international symposiums, conferences and congresses.

A native of Italy, Dr. Ghelli moved to the United States in 1994 after studying at the University of Florence and received his Ph.D. in Italian in 2005 from the Department of Italian at Rutgers University In the fall of 2008, Dr. Ghelli joined the Department of Foreign Languages, ESL, and Humanities at York College, where he teaches Italian and World Literature courses.

Elizabeth Meddeb is Associate Professor of English as a Second Language (ESL) and Humanities. She also serves as the Coordinator of ESL. She teaches advanced composition courses to non-native speakers of English, as well as several core courses in linguistics and the humanities.  Her research interests include the interaction between technology and language use and conversation analysis. She is currently working on a study that investigates how speech recognition technology shapes both spoken and written language use for  speakers of non-standard varieties of American English. This study is an outgrowth of her dissertation research at Columbia University and her professional work experience at IBM's T J Watson Research Center.

Juana M. Ramos was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador. She has been living in New York since 1990. She is a writer, poet and educator.From 1999 to 2007 she was an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at York College. In 2007 she became a full time Lecturer of Spanish at the same institution where she currently teaches. As a poet she has participated and represented her country in different poetry conferences and cultural activities in New York City, México, Spain, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Honduras,Cuba, and Puerto Rico. In June 2010 she published her first poetry book Multiplicada en mí. Her poems have also appeared in the XIII and XIV Anthologies of the International Poetry Conference in Zamora, México; Poetas latinos en Nueva York, México, D.F., and in digital journals/blogs. She is also a co-founder of the literary group "Coordenadas".

Sonia Rivera-Valdés is a writer, literary and film critic and a professor of Spanish Language and Literature at York College. She was born in Cuba, and now lives in New York. In January of 1997, she won the Casa de Las Américas literary prize, one of the most prestigious awards in Latin American, with Las historias prohibidas de Marta Veneranda, a short story book about the intimate lives of Latino immigrants in New York. Her second book, Historias de mujeres grandes y chiquitas, was published by Editorial Campana, New York, in 2003. The translation of this book to English, Stories of Little Women and Grown Up Girls, will be published by Ed. Campana by the end of 2006. Sonia's articles and stories ha ve been extensively published in anthologies and literary magazines in the United States and other countries.

My research interests lie in the implementation of language planning and the policies aimed at assuring the primacy of Modern Standard Arabic in Algeria. I am also interested  in the attitudes of Algerian language users towards Modern Standard Arabic, Algerian Arabic, the Tamazight language as well as toward the process of Arabization itself, and lastly the Tamazight people’s fight for linguistic recognition and rights.

Fabiola Fernández Salek holds a Ph.D. in Spanish with a concentration in Gender and Film from Arizona State University. As a consequence of her parents being in exile during the dictatorships in Bolivia, she spent her childhood living in Chile, Austria, and Germany. Therefore, the importance of human rights, acquiring different languages, and a widely diverse cultural background became clear to her early in life. In 2006 she joined York College as an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Coordinator of Women’s Studies. In 2011 she became the Chair of the Department of FL, ESL & Humanities. Her research on film and contemporary culture focuses on human rights, immigration, gender, and the construction of identity and nationality. Fabiola has contributed with entries to dictionaries, book chapters, journals, and she presented at numerous national and international conferences. She is currently co-editing the book Screening Torture for Columbia Press.