Don E. Walicek, Ph.D.

Email: don.walicek@upr.edu

Academic Degrees:

BA, Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin

MA, Latin American Studies (History & Anthropology) University of Texas at Austin

PhD, English (Linguistics), University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus

Areas of Expertise:

linguistics, Caribbean studies, cultural studies, writing

About: 

Professor Don E. Walicek holds a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Graduate Program in Linguistics. His main academic interests are in the areas of language contact, historical linguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, cultural studies, writing, and translation theory. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as a Visiting Scholar at New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of Bamberg, and University of Ljubljana. His publications include chapters and articles on linguistic and cultural contact in Anguilla, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. He has also published on decolonization in Caribbean contexts. He is co-editor of the book Guantánamo and American Empire: The Humanities Respond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and the Sargasso volume Guantánamo: What’s Next? He has completed public humanities projects built on partnerships with the Anguilla Library Service, Casa de la Historia (Guantánamo City, Cuba), and the Center of Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz (Austria). Walicek serves as Editor of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso, a position he has held since 2009, and he is the local coordinator for Puerto Rico’s International Corpus of English (ICE) project. In addition, he is a published poet.

Undergraduate Courses:

  • Language and Gender
  • Language Change
  • Introduction to Discourse Analysis
  • Expository Writing, I & II
  • Introduction to Sociolinguistics
  • Special Topics in Caribbean Literature and Culture
  • Interdisciplinary Approaches to Haiti’s Past and Present
  • Refugee Discourse
  • Guantánamo and the Empire of Freedom

Graduate Courses:

  • General Linguistics
  • Language and Culture
  • Historical Sociolinguistics
  • Pidgin and Creole Languages
  • Semiotics
  • The Development of Modern English Phonetics and Phonemics of North American English