Lesley Feracho is a quiet woman with a rich heritage. Although she grew up in New York City, both her parents are from Trinidad, and she can visit relatives in such places as Antigua, Venezuela, England, Canada, and the United States.

Despite her inherent modesty, easy laughter, and casual manner, Feracho has gained growing acclaim as a scholar and teacher, and her first book, Linking the Americas: Race, Hybrid Discourses and the Reformulation of Feminine Identity will be published soon.

An only child of supportive parents, Feracho was born in Brooklyn but grew up in Queens where her parents combined the focused work-ethic of new immigrants with deep, lasting memories of Trinidad and the islands of the Caribbean.

“They had high expectations for me, but they never tried to tell me what to do with my life,” says Feracho. “They always supported me, and even when I changed my major from biology to Spanish in college, they were right there for me.”

With her mother’s work as a nurse and her father’s job as a switching-equipment technician, the small family was busy, and early on, Lesley learned the joy of languages and a life of the mind. Her heritage and her love of scholarship braided together into a career that led her to UGA in 1997 as an assistant (now associate) professor of Romance languages and African American studies.

Though she didn’t make the leap into languages until her sophomore year at Cornell, she was always teaching, even as a child, when she would create imaginary classrooms whose invisible students had names.

Trinidadians are native English speakers, but Feracho was drawn to the Spanish language early, and she recalls with affection two early teachers who influenced her, Señor Madrid, a fourth-grade teacher, and Señorita Giles from high school.

“I applied only to a few schools, but Cornell was perfect for a lot of reasons,” she says. “First of all, it has a great reputation, but it was also not too far from home.”

She started out as a biology major, heading toward a pre-med track, but that idea foundered quickly on the shoals of organic chemistry and other subjects that she realized “were not my calling.” Instead, she let her interest in Spanish rise to the surface, and she has made its language and literature her life’s work.

A study abroad trip to Seville at the end of her junior year only cemented her love of all things Spanish, and after finishing her degree at Cornell, she was off to Duke University, where she earned a master’s in Romance languages and a doctorate in Romance studies.

With near-native ability in Spanish, fluency in Portuguese, and a reading knowledge of French, Feracho’s teaching and research took off when she reached Athens. Her areas of specialization include comparative studies of 20th century Afro-Hispanic and African-American women’s narrative and comparative studies of African-American and Latin American feminist theory, among many interests. She has authored many articles and book chapters, and her book Linking the Americas will be out from SUNY University Press next year.

She has presented papers all over the world and was a Lilly Teaching Fellow at UGA in the 1999-2000 academic year. She has taught introductory courses in Spanish language and literature, advanced grammar and composition, and many other courses since coming to UGA.

Feracho has already begun work on a second book, which will focus on African-American women writers and works of contemporary Afro-Hispanic women writers from the 1980s until today. In her spare time, she loves music and mixes tapes, which she often uses in class, to explain current culture in the Caribbean and the diaspora. She also loves to curl up with a mystery, fantasy, or science fiction book when she has time.

Despite having grown up in New York, she has visited Trinidad often, where she has many relatives, and that island nation’s rich cultural heritage will continue to lead her toward new ideas of scholarship and her place in it.