Our Language Stories: Building Multilingual Mainers

Margaret Boyle is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Program at Bowdoin College. Her teaching and research span the languages, literature and cultures of early modern Spain and colonial Latin America. She is the author of Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence and Punishment in Early Modern Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2014) and co-editor of Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective (with Sarah Owens, University of Toronto Press, 2021). Her newest book is Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook (with Ilan Stavans, University of North Carolina Press, 2024), and was named a 2025 National Jewish Book Award finalist in the category of Jewish Food Writing and Cookbooks (the Jane and Stuart Weitz­man Fam­i­ly Award).

Professor Boyle is the director of Multilingual Mainers, an elementary world languages and cultures program providing age-appropriate tools to combat xenophobia, racism and intolerance through engagement with languages other than English. She has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Whiting Foundation for work in cultural and international exchange. She is also a scholar-partner for UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics Initiative.