Dr. Stephen Fafulas is an Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi, where he teaches courses on Spanish language, culture, and linguistics. He holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from Indiana University with a specialization in the intersection of Second Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics. Since 2013, he is director of the SoCIOLing (Study of Communities, Involvement & Outreach and Linguistics) Lab, through which he mentors students and leads a number of research initiatives with bilingual communities globally.

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Dr. Fafulas’s projects have been funded by organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications have been featured in journals such as Linguistics Vanguard and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. He is sole editor of “Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution,” published with John Benjamins in 2020, which documents emerging Spanish-speaking populations in the Amazon.

 

Dr. Fafulas is co-founder of the SEC Spanish Consortium, which promotes cross-disciplinary scholarship and cross-institutional collaborations aimed at documenting newly-established Latinx communities in the U.S. South. 

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In 2022, Dr. Fafulas was awarded a Fulbright award to Spain, where he gave research seminars to graduate students at Universidad de Murcia and conducted research with the Ecuadorian community living there. Currently, Dr. Fafulas is working on his Faculty Laureate’s project, which includes a documentary on Mississippi’s Latinx community.