Margarita Hernandez de Polaczyk , Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Practice of Spanish

Margarita Hernández de Polaczyk holds a Ph.D.  in Hispanic Studies, with a second concentration in Applied Linguistics. She specializes in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Spanish-American and Central American literature. She holds two master's degrees. The first is in Spanish-American Literature from Universidad Rafael Landívar (Guatemala), and the second is in Hispanic Lexicography from the prestigious program of the Real Academia Española (RAE), the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) and Universidad de León (Spain). Dr. Hernández de Polaczyk holds a Licentiate Degree in Language and Literary Education (Summa cum laude) awarded by Universidad Francisco Marroquín (Guatemala). She received a fellowship from Fundación Carolina (2010-2011) to conduct lexicography studies in Madrid, Spain. From 2011-2013, she received the fellowship Beca Cooperación Española MAEC-AECID to conduct research and lexicography work at the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua, affiliated to the Real Academia Española. 

She has published several works of literary criticism in books and journals that focus on how to teach the early literary production of Central American modernista writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo and the politicization of affect and emotions in early twentieth-century Guatemalan literature.   She is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project, Humanities-Engineering, to research the late-nineteen-century and early twentieth-century Guatemalan mobility dream, its infrastructure (railway system and the figure of the mecapalero), and its literature and visual imagery. The research group presented the first results at the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2024 conference. 

In linguistics, Dr. Hernández de Polaczyk has participated in joint projects between the RAE and ASALE related to phonetics, orthography, and corpus linguistics. As a lexicographer her experience includes a collaboration in the edition of the Diccionario de la lengua española, known as DLE (RAE-ASALE, 2014), considered by Spanish speakers as the authoritative and normative dictionary of Spanish Language, and a project to coordinate the contents of two leading Spanish dictionaries: Diccionario de Americanismos (DA) (RAE-ASALE, 2010) and the DRAE (2001). She is an individual member of the research network Redacta (RED PANHISPÁNICA DE ACADEMIAS, UNIVERSIDADES Y CENTROS DE INVESTIGACIÓN). She is an editor of the Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (Real Academia Española), which is currently the largest project in the Spanish language that is studying the history of Spanish language words. Her research interests include Nineteenth Century Central American Lexicography, focusing on the first project for a dictionary of Central American Spanish as a linguistic unit. She likes to swim and spend time with her family in her spare time.

PHD. Dissertation title: Gómez Carrillo: la estética de loinacabado

Sample publications:

• “Flores literarias (1906): el trabajo pro bono del escritor guatemalteco y el imaginariosentimental y la caridad en la Guatemala de inicios del siglo XX”. Contribution to the dossier “Capital y trabajo: experiencias y ficciones en las literaturas centroamericanas de los siglos XX y XXI”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (UP Liverpool). (Forthcoming, 2024)
• “Gómez Carrillo's Early Writings: Cosmopolitan Desire and Impressionistic Criticism.”Contribution for the Modern Language Association anthology, TeachingCentral American Literature in a Global Context( 2022).