Braden Clinger, Ph.D.
Dr. Braden Clinger is an Assistant Professor of Spanish (3-year Term) at Simpson College where he teaches Spanish classes at all levels, including Spanish for special purposes (e.g. Translation and Spanish for the Professions) and advanced Spanish classes. Originally from rural Power County, Idaho, Braden has a lifelong interest in multilingual education, as well as folk and popular culture, and rurality.
Prior to Simpson College, Braden was a graduate student at Boston University where he attained pedagogy certificates in Teaching Writing and Teaching Language, Literature, and Film. At BU, Braden became dedicated to a compassionate and student-centered, culturally and socially grounded, proficiency-based pedagogy. He received an award for teaching excellence from the department of Romance Studies in 2021 and a research travel grant to Paraguay in 2022.
His dissertation, Mediations of Popular Belief in the Southern Cone: Museums, Prose, New Media, and Film on the Traditional Guarani Frontier, considers the transnational relations among Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay by centering their shared indigenous past, examining a broad swathe of cultural production from the region, including prose and poetry, film and television, museums, videogames and myth. In doing so, Braden’s dissertation asserts the importance of the popular and brings new energy to the critical conversation around this sometimes overlooked region in Latin American studies.
After graduating from Utah State University, Braden worked for two years as a North American Language and Culture Assistant (Auxiliar de Conversación) in public primary and secondary schools in Andalusia, Spain.
Braden has published in Romance Notes, Periphērica, and The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies.