True calling
| Professor finds life’s work in Spanish
language, literature |
By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
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| With near-native ability
in Spanish, fluency in Portuguese, and a reading
knowledge of French, Lesley Feracho’s teaching
and research took off when she reached Athens. (Photo
by Peter Frey) |
Lesley Feracho is a quiet woman with a rich heritage.
Although she grew up in New York City, both her parents
are from Trinidad, and she can visit relatives in such
places as Antigua, Venezuela, England, Canada and the
United States.
Despite her inherent modesty, easy laughter and casual
manner, Feracho has gained growing acclaim as a scholar
and teacher, and her first book, Linking the Americas:
Race, Hybrid Discourses and the Reformulation of Feminine
Identity will be published soon.
An only child of supportive parents, Feracho was born
in Brooklyn but grew up in Queens, where her parents combined
the focused work-ethic of new immigrants with deep, lasting
memories of Trinidad and the islands of the Caribbean.
“They had high expectations for me, but they
never tried to tell me what to do with my life,”
says Feracho. “They always supported me, and even
when I changed my major from biology to Spanish in college,
they were right there for me.”
With her mother’s work as a nurse and her father’s
job as a switching-equipment technician, the small family
was busy. Early on, Feracho learned the joy of languages
and a life of the mind. Her heritage and her love of scholarship
braided together into a career that led her to UGA in
1997 as a faculty member in Romance languages and African-American
studies.
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| FACTS |
| LESLEY FERACHO |
| Associate professor of Romance
languages and African-American studies |
B.A., Spanish: Cornell University,
1990
M.A., Romance Languages: Duke University, 1993
Ph.D., Romance Studies: Duke University, 1997
At UGA: 6 years |
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Though she didn’t make the leap into languages until
her sophomore year at Cornell, she was always teaching,
even as a child, when she would create imaginary classrooms
filled with invisible, but individually named, students.
Trinidadians are native English speakers, but Feracho
was drawn to the Spanish language early, and she recalls
two teachers who influenced her: Señor Madrid,
a fourth-grade teacher, and Señorita Giles, from
high school.
“I applied only to a few schools,
but Cornell was perfect for a lot of reasons,” she
says. “First of all, it has a great reputation,
but it was also not too far from home.”
She started out as a biology major, heading toward a pre-med
track, but that idea foundered quickly on the shoals of
organic chemistry and other subjects that she realized
“were not my calling.” Instead, she let her
interest in Spanish rise to the surface, and she has made
its language and literature her life’s work.
With near-native ability in Spanish, fluency in Portuguese,
and a reading knowledge of French, Feracho’s teaching
and research took off when she reached Athens. Her areas
of specialization include comparative studies of 20th-century
Afro-Hispanic and African-American women’s narratives
and comparative studies of African American and Latin
American feminist theory. Feracho has already begun work
on a second book, which will focus on African-American
women writers and works of contemporary Afro-Hispanic
women writers from the 1980s until today. She loves music
and mixes tapes, which she often uses in class to explain
current culture in the Caribbean and the diaspora.
She has visited Trinidad often, where she has many relatives,
and that island nation’s rich cultural heritage
will continue to lead her toward new ideas of scholarship
and her place in it. |
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