Before joining the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown in 2004, Nidia Schuhmacher was involved in foreign language teaching for twenty years. Her teaching experience involved English as a Foreign Language and English as a Second Language as well as Italian and Spanish in Argentina, Italy, and the United States. She has taught in diverse educational and cultural settings in New York and in the Boston area, where she has conducted courses at Tufts University, at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and in summer language programs at Boston University. In her fifteen years at Brandeis University, she was a Lecturer in Spanish in the Department of Romance and Comparative Literature where she coordinated language teaching in the Spanish area.
Her work has involved mentoring and training teachers, designing curricula, and developing course materials, as well as undertaking projects in translation, interpretation, and editorial work. Her areas of interest include language pedagogy, the use of technology in language instruction, second language acquisition, the teaching of writing and culture and translation. In recent years, she has developed a special interest in the intersection of the arts and performance with language learning.
At Brown, Nidia Schuhmacher continues her involvement with the language curriculum, teaches and coordinates different language courses in the Spanish Language program. She has designed and developed a course in Intensive Basic Spanish, which was offered for the first time in the fall 2010. She has sponsored Group Independent Study Projects in Medical Spanish and is currently the Faculty Adviser for the student-directed Medical Spanish curriculum in the Brown Alpert Medical School. She has recently designed HISP 710E, Introduction to Professional Translation and Interpretation offered every Fall since 2018. She has served as director of the Language Program in Hispanic Studies between January 2006 and May 2011, served as Faculty Advising Fellow and she is a freshman and sophomore advisor. She received the John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities for 2015 (May 2015).
