DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Estilita María Cassiani Obeso is an Assistant professor of Instruction. She received her M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics and her PhD in Spanish and Language Science at The Pennsylvania State University. 

Her research interests include Pidgins and Creole Languages, Language Variation and Change, Language Revitalization and Documentation, Sociolinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Instruction.   

Estilita is a member of the Palenquero community who speaks and does research about her ancestral language. Her research primarily focuses on the study of morphological aspects of the Palenquero language, an Afro-Hispanic creole language spoken in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. Through a broadly usage-based and variationist approach, Estilita examines sociolinguistic variation and generational language change in adults and young speakers of Palenquero.

Estilita’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation through the Partnerships in International Research and Education (PIRE) program as well as other competitive grants. She has published findings in peer reviewed general linguistics journals including Language Variation and Change, and Languages. In the latter, she contributed to a special issue on “Instructed Heritage Language Acquisition in Diverse Contexts”. She has attended workshops on revitalization and language planning and documentation, including the NSF workshop Language Learning in Native American Revitalization Programs (LLiNARP). She has also presented her work at conferences such as the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Multilingualism: Global South and Global North Perspectives, among others.  

Estilita is an experienced Spanish teacher who has received teaching awards as well as high course evaluations. She has taught lower and upper division courses at the undergraduate level, including Elementary and Intermediate Spanish, Composition and Conversational Spanish, and Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.

Publications 

• Cassiani Obeso, E., & Smith, H. (2020). Variable plural marking in Palenquero Creole. Language Variation and Change, 32(3), 293-315. doi:10.1017/S0954394520000204.
• Cassiani Obeso, E. M. (2021). Reinforcement of Grammatical Structures through Explicit Instruction in Palenquero Creole: A Pilot Study. Languages 6(41). https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages6010041.
• Trujillo-Falcon, J., Gaviria Pabon, A., Ripberger, J., Bitterman, A., Thornton J., Krocak, M., Ernst, S., Cassiani Obeso, E., Lipski, J. (Forthcoming, 2022). ¿Aviso o Alerta? Developing Effective, Inclusive, and Consistent Watch and Warning Translations for U.S. Spanish Speakers. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.