New CSC Spanish professor is widely traveled

She is Alison Krogel, a native of Spokane, Wash., who earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the University of Maryland this spring. She replaces Dr. Hilda Lopez-Laval, who retired after teaching at Chadron State the past 10 years.

While Krogel (pronounced Crow-gull) was in high school, she won an essay contest on the Holocaust. The prize was a trip to Spain that was paid for by Parade Magazine.

The trip encouraged her to study languages when she enrolled at the University of Washington. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature. She graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2000. As an undergraduate student, she visited southern Spain and Ecuador.

Krogel earned both her master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Maryland. She wrote her dissertation on “Representations of Food and Cooking in Quechua Cultural Texts.” For the research, she spent most last year in Peru researching and writing about artistic representations of Andean foods and cooks in Quechua stories, songs and visual art. Quechua was the language of the Incas and today is spoken by more than 10 million people living in the Andean region of South America.

Much of the time while she was in Peru, she lived in Cuzco, the capital of the Inca empire, but she also traveled to all of the South American countries except Venezuela and Colombia.

As a graduate student at Maryland, Krogel taught world literature, particularly as it involved women, and Spanish. She was selected as the outstanding teaching assistant for the Comparative Literature Department during both semesters of the 2004-05 school year. She also has served as a Spanish interpreter and translator.

While studying at Maryland, Krogel met and married another graduate student, Gustavo Fierros, a native of Mexico City. She said he will be writing his dissertation this fall while living in Chadron.