Faculty
Ivy Arbulú
Ivy Arbulú is associate professor of Spanish. She came to the U.S. after completing her college education in literature with a minor in linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She completed her MA and PhD at the University of Virginia. The two main areas of Spanish language literature that interest her are the Spanish Golden Age poetry and prose and modern Latin American fiction. For the last three years, Professor Arbulú has been learning Arabic. Her goal is to be able to read medieval Andalusian poetry written in Arabic. Apart from learning another language, she enjoys reading, going to the movies, walking with her dogs, and traveling to her native Peru to enjoy the good food that she misses so much.
Julie George Garkov
Julie George Garkov, adjunct instructor, (BA Kalamazoo College; MA TESOL, The Pennsylvania State University; MA Spanish, California State University, Sacramento). Julie has been teaching Spanish and English as a second language at MBC since 1993. She has lived, studied, and traveled extensively in Spain, and has also done graduate work in Mexico and Peru. As an undergraduate she studied at the Université de Caen in France for one semester, and after graduation taught EFL in France as a French government scholarship winner. Julie enjoys practicing yoga, gardening, reading, and hiking with her husband and two children.
Nelson Sanchez
I was born in the island of Cuba. My family immigrated to the United States during the era of the “Freedom Flights” from Havana to Miami. We arrived in Miami when I was 11 years old. Our stay in Miami lasted but a few months as we moved to Hartford, Connecticut where employment opportunities were better for my father. I attended a public junior high school in Hartford; it’s there that I began to learn English. By the time I attended Hartford Public High School I was quite proficient in the use of English, so I was placed in college-bound courses. I graduated with a high rank in this very large high school and my hard work was rewarded when I was accepted to Amherst College. I graduated from Amherst College with a Spanish major and English minor. At Amherst I became keenly aware of the value of a liberal arts education; an awareness that has motivated and inspired me throughout my life. Upon graduation I worked in several businesses: insurance, law, and advertising. Some years later I decided to attend graduate school in Spanish literature. I studied for six years at the University of Texas at Austin. There I received a Master’s degree and completed all my work, including the comprehensive examinations for the PhD. Before I finished my thesis I started to teach at Wake Forest University and was so taken by technology and its use in education that I took yet another turn. This latter field (i.e. technology in teaching) I’ve cultivated on my own. Here at Mary Baldwin College, I use my experience in diverse disciplines to teach Spanish, to teach the use of technology in teaching, and to supervise the Language Resource Center. I’m living proof that a liberal arts education can take you for quite a ride...