Phone:

812-855-9551

Email:

cfelixbr@indiana.edu

Website:

https://global.iu.edu

Department:

Global Gateways

Office:

Office of the Vice President for International Affairs

Campus:

IU

Biography

J. César Félix-Brasdefer is the Academic Director of the IU Mexico Gateway Office. In this role he works with the Mexico Gateway staff and colleagues at IU Global to promote research and academic activities between IU faculty and students and institutions of higher education in Latin America. Indiana University has a broad range of faculty and students with interdisciplinary research across Spanish-speaking regions and Brazil. With Spanish and Portuguese as global languages, he looks forward to expanding IU's internationalization mission with other gateways. His aim is to engage our faculty in academic discussions of current issues such as the revitalization and diversity of indigenous languages, to further promote the internationalization of IU study abroad programs, to foster IU intellectual exchange through collaborative conferences, and to connect IU faculty, students, and alumni with researchers in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central, and South America.

He is Professor of Linguistics and Spanish in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and adjunct in the Departments of Linguistics and Second Language Studies. He received his B.A. from the Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, México, an M.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.S. from Georgetown University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. His research includes topics related to Pragmatics and Discourse analysis, two areas of linguistics that examine how meaning is expressed and negotiated through language use in context. He is mainly interested in the intersection between language use, language and cognition, the negotiation of meaning, multilingual contexts, and intercultural and cross-cultural communication. He has researched various linguistic topics in different regions of Latin America, including varieties of Mexico, the Caribbean (Dominican Republic), Central (Costa Rica), and South America (Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia). He is currently researching the pragmatics of intercultural competence from a discursive perspective in foreign language and study abroad contexts. His research publications include nine books, numerous peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and articles for handbooks. He is the author of The Language of Service Encounters: A Pragmatic-Discursive Approach (2015, Cambridge University Press) and Spanish Pragmatics (Routledge, 2019). His recent co-edited volumes include The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics (2021, Routledge), New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics (2021, Mouton De Gruyter), and Pragmatic Variation and Service Encounters (2020, Routledge). He served as the Executive Secretary of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA) and is currently on the editorial boards of Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Pragmatics, and Spanish in Context.

Professor Félix-Brasdefer served as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, where he connected faculty and students with academic and research interests in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central, and South America. In this capacity, he developed initiatives with academic programs in various regions of Latin America. He served as the Director of the Graduate Linguistics Program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where is currently Director of Undergraduate Studies. He has been a member of the Overseas Study Advisory Council (OSAC) at Indiana University since 2006. In this capacity, he advises on issues related to safety and responsibility, reviews applications for IU study abroad programs across the IU campuses, and conducts reviews in Spain and Latin America for study abroad programs administered by the Office of Overseas Study