NEW DIRECTOR APPOINTED FOR UC LMRI

Giorgio Perissinotto, professor and chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Santa Barbara, has been appointed director of the University of California's Linguistic Minority Research Institute. The UC LMRI, housed on the Santa Barbara campus, is a UC multicampus research unit established in 1984 to foster interdisciplinary research in collaboration with California public schools in order to improve academic achievement and access to higher education for children from diverse language backgrounds.

"It is my hope that through our work at the institute, researchers from the nine campuses and other scholars, policy-makers, and K-12 teachers, students and parents will have the necessary tools to address language minority and language rights issues," says Perissinotto, who sees his tenure at the LMRI as an opportunity to expand the scope of the institute's missions.

"I am confident that under Giorgio Perissinotto's leadership the institute will continue to grow and flourish," says Reynaldo Mac'as, a UCSB professor of education who served for over five years as director and continues to be a principal investigator at LMRI.

A faculty member at UCSB since 1977, Perissinotto has published widely in the field of Hispanic linguistics and literature. His most recent project deals with the establishment of Spanish-speaking communities in early Alta California and thebeginning of bilingualism in the region. His interest in language minorities dates to the early1970s when he worked for the Mexican Secretariat of Education in the state of Oaxaca. He participated in a large-scale project to address the language needs of speakers of Indian languages, and continues to maintain professional ties with Mexican scholars in the field of Hispanic linguistics.

The institute's web site is http://lmri.ucsb.edu/.

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