Dr. Robert E. Vann, Professor in the WMU Department of Spanish, received his B.A. and M.A. at The University of Illinois-Urbana and his Ph.D. in Iberoromance Linguistics and Philology at The University of Texas-Austin. Professor Vann is a specialist in Spanish language, culture, and society in Catalonia. His main areas of research have investigated ways of speaking, linguistic identities, and linguistic ideologies in Barcelona, the sociocultural and linguistic effects of language contact and bilingualism in Catalonia, and, most recently, the documentation and digital preservation of spoken language data in Catalan Spanish. Dr. Vann's first book on this subject, Materials for the sociolinguistic description and corpus-based study of Spanish in Barcelona: Toward a documentation of colloquial Spanish in naturally occurring groups (2009), includes a critical introduction that recognizes the legitimacy of Spanish in Catalonia and contains the first published transcripts of a spoken language corpus of colloquial Spanish conversations held in naturally-occurring social groups in Barcelona. The monograph provides a resource for studying the unique characteristics of Catalan Spanish. Dr. Vann has created more than fifteen different Spanish linguistics courses at WMU and he directed WMU’s only doctoral dissertation in Spanish linguistics. From 2006 to 2010, Dr. Vann was founding director of a student exchange program with Universitat de Lleida, Catalonia. Dr. Vann has given plenary and keynote lectures at international conferences in Spain, England, Germany, and the United States and has published more than 30 refereed articles on language contact, language ideology, and language documentation. He is currently authoring his second book, provisionally titled The Generation of 1995 in Catalonia: Local perspectives on language and society, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024.