Cristal R. Heffelfinger-Nieves

Academic Degree:

PhD, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus (2019)

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About: 

Cristal R. Heffelfinger-Nieves was raised in Utuado, Puerto Rico, as a Spanish-English bilingual. She later acquired Italian as her third language and participated in a summer exchange program at Università del Salento, in Lecce, Italy. She completed a B.A. in Journalism (2012), an M.A. in Linguistics (2014), and a Ph.D. in Caribbean Linguistics (2019), at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, where she also taught writing and conversational English courses. Her doctoral dissertation, “Pragmatic Behavior in Postcolonial Communities of the Eastern Anglophone Caribbean: A Comparative Analysis of Politeness Strategies in St. Eustatius, St. Croix, and Barbados,” received funding from DEGI (Decanato de Estudios Graduados e Investigación) and earned her the English Graduate Program’s Joan Fayer Award.

Dr. Heffelfinger-Nieves has conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean and has published several papers in edited volumes and scholarly journals. She has also participated in local and international conferences focusing on Caribbean languages, cultures, and histories, including Anglophone communities and her native Puerto Rico. After three years of teaching at the University of Puerto Rico at Utuado, where she also became an online course facilitator and designer, she is proud to return to her Alma Mater as Assistant Professor at the Department of English, College of Humanities.