Margarita Jara Yupanqui
Dr.Margarita Jara is a Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at UNLV. She obtained a B.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She received her master’s degree and Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics, as well as the Certificate of Latin American Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.
Her research focuses on Amazonian and Peruvian Spanish. She has authored several articles on Spanish variation and change, language contact, and language ideologies. These have been published in various professional journals, such as Spanish in Context, Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and Isogloss. In addition, she has co-authored book chapters published by Brill, Routledge, and Peter Lang. Her book El perfecto en el español de Lima. Variación y cambio en situación de contacto lingüístico was published by the Fondo Editorial of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2013). Her recent work explores the pluperfect (Iberoamericana-Vervuert), imperfect (Intertexto), and diminutive (RSEL), as well as the discourse marker ‘ya vuelta’ (Letras), in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish. She is also the leading editor of Spanish Diversity in the Amazon: Dialect and Language Contact Perspectives (Brill, 2023), and the special volume Amazonian Spanish: Studies on the diversity of contacts in the Amazonia, towards a regional contextualization and delimitation of monolingual dialects in the Letras journal (2025).”
Before arriving at UNLV, Dr. Jara taught at the Universidad de Lima and other educational institutions in Peru. She also worked training bilingual Indigenous teachers and doing fieldwork in Peruvian Amazonian communities (1988-1992). Dr. Jara has taught all levels of Spanish and undergraduate and graduate linguistic courses. She regularly teaches Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics, Spanish Dialectology, Topics in Hispanic Linguistics, and Spanish Phonetics and Phonology at the undergraduate level. She offers courses such as Seminar in Spanish Linguistics, Spanish Sociolinguistics, Spanish Dialectology, and Topics in Hispanic Studies at the graduate level.
Dr. Jara’s dedication and excellence in research, teaching and service have been recognized through awards and scholarships: the William Morris Award for Excellence in Teaching from the humanities (2025), the UNLV Faculty Opportunity Award (2024), the Dr. Catherine Gullo Bellver Endowed Scholar in the Humanities Fellowship (2023-2024), the College of Liberal Arts Diversity Award (2012); and through various nominations: College of Liberal Arts William Morris Award for Excellence in Teaching (2024, 2022, 2010), UNLV Foundation Distinguished Teaching Award (2021), Donald Schmiedel Service Award (2024).
