Portrait of Rachel Showstack

Rachel Showstack, Ph.D.

Founding Director of Alce su Voz
Associate Professor of Spanish
at Wichita State University

Rachel Showstack (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Wichita State University, Co-Director of the Academic Center for Biomedical and Health Humanities and Founding Director of Alce su Voz (ASV). She received her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and her MA in Spanish from Sacramento State University in 2006.

Dr. Showstack’s current scholarship addresses language and health equity and community-based learning and research methods. Her work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited collections, and she is co-author of the books Health Disparities and the Applied Linguist and Language Ideologies and Linguistic Identity in Heritage Language Learning. In addition to her academic writing, she also regularly contributes op-ed pieces to state and local news publications and posts for the Alce su Voz blog.

 At Wichita State, she has taught a range of Spanish language and linguistics and interdisciplinary honors courses and regularly teaches an introductory linguistics course for language majors. In her free time, she enjoys reading, swimming, hiking with her family, and snuggling with her cats.


Blog

  • Alce su Voz Loses Two Federal Grants

    By Rachel Showstack and Savannah Paschal Like many US programs that depend on federal funding, Alce su Voz is currently facing a loss of resources that will affect our efforts to improve healthcare outcomes in Kansas. This is occurring amid widespread federal budget cuts to research, such as the proposed budgetary cuts to the National…

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  • Alce su Voz Offers Recommendations for Improved Healthcare Language Services in Kansas

    By Rachel Showstack Imagine that you recently moved to a country where almost everyone else speaks a language that you do not know well. You understand a few words here and there and you have learned to produce very simple sentences. When you talk, you sound like a foreigner. One day, you get a terrible…

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