Megwen May Loveless

Megwen has been teaching Portuguese and developing curricula for the Portuguese classroom for over fifteen years. She has taught at Harvard and Princeton universities and is currently the Director of the Basic Language Program in Portuguese at Tulane University. She finished her doctoral dissertation in the Cultural Anthropology department at Harvard University in 2010 and has long encouraged colleagues across disciplines to acknowledge the importance of teaching culture in the language classroom as well as the importance of teaching language to students and scholars of culture. 

Her pedagogy emphasizes the use of music, popular culture and new media, as well as innovative teaching methods and expansion of the language program outside of the traditional classroom. Additional interests include: program development and enrollment building, telecollaboration, community-based learning, mentoring of graduate students and teaching assistants, games and play in the language classroom, development of strategic competence, oral proficiency/pronunciation, extracurricular program development, literacy in L2/L3, conceptualization of Portuguese as a global language and incorporation of African and Asian linguistic and cultural content into the curriculum, African diaspora in Latin America, ethnomusicology and Afro-Brazilian religion/dance/music.