Victoria Malawey (top left), Jesús Ernesto Ortiz-Diaz (top right), Mario Solis-Garcia (bottom left) and Karin Vélez (bottom right)

St. Paul, Minn. – Four new tenure-track faculty members have joined Macalester this fall. They are Victoria Malawey (Music), Jesús Ernesto Ortiz-Diaz (Hispanic and Latin American Studies), Mario Solis-Garcia (Economics) and Karin Vélez (History).

Malawey’s research interests include the analysis of songs, popular music, music theory pedagogy, and gender studies. She has written on a wide range of topics, including the musician Bjork. She is also a composer who has written for mixed chamber and vocal ensembles. Her master’s and PhD degrees are from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. More

Ortiz-Diaz’s main research areas include Latin American colonial and 19th century literature with a focus on narrative and poetry. His approach is comparative and his focus is on the two Iberian hemispheres that constitute the regions of Spanish America and Brazil. He is examining the portrayal of nature in Latin American literature. He has a master’s degree from the University of Colorado and a PhD from the University of California-Davis. More

Solis-Garcia’s fields of concentration are macroeconomics, growth and development, and financial economics. His work explores the business cycle implications of changes in expectations about the course of future fiscal policy, the connection between government policy and the size of the shadow economy, and the effects of regulation on labor markets over Spanish business cycles. He has a master’s degree from El Colegio de Mexico and a master’s and a PhD from the University of Minnesota. More

Vélez is especially interested in religious encounters, comparative empire, the transoceanic spread of Catholic devotion, the experience of indigenous women on the American frontiers, and the communal formulation of myths. In researching her dissertation, she followed a trail of documents from colonial and Jesuit archives in Lisbon, Seville, Madrid, Paris, Rome and Toronto, to missionary outposts in Quebec and the Bolivian Amazon. Her master’s and PhD degrees are from Princeton University. More

Macalester College, founded in 1874, is a national liberal arts college with a full-time enrollment of 1,985 students. Macalester is nationally recognized for its long-standing commitment to academic excellence, internationalism, multiculturalism and civic engagement.  Learn more at macalester.edu

September 9 2011

Back to top