Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik

I have over 30 years of teaching experience in Norway, the United States, and Spain. In my current position as  Associate Professor of Latin American literature, I have been responsible for creating, coordinating, and developing courses at the undergraduate and graduate level (SPLA100, SPLA108, SPLA118, SPLA208, SPLA258, SPLA312, SPLA314, and SPLA315). I have also created and taught SAP100, a course that aims to demonstrate the professional competence that language studies provide through practice in institutions and establishments abroad or in Norway.

As a teacher, I help students learn specific literary and cultural contents as well as general communicative competences in Spanish. The overall goal of my classes is to reveal to my students the literary and cultural production of the Spanish-speaking world. However, I believe that foreign language programs in higher education should foster and sustain continued progress both in theoretical content and in language proficiency. More specifically, I endorse a curriculum desing that aims to anable students to function successfully in a Spanish-language academic context as well as in everyday environments.

Current Ph.D. Advising:

At UiB, I am currently advising Kristine Seljemoen. Her dissertation explores how medicine practices and health and beauty products were represented in the 19th-century Central American press. The working title of her dissertation is "Health and Loveliness: Narrating Daily Life at the Costa Rican Fin de Siècle" and it is expected to be submitted in December 2026.

I am also co-advising Adriana Ramírez at the University of Havana. The working title of the dissertation is 'Un involutarion sollozo de mi alma': el discurso de la sensibilidad en Francisco (1875) and the expected submission date is April 2023.

Defended dissertations:

Gianfranco Selgas: Regionalismo ensamblado. Medioambiente, modernidad y reacción político-cultural en Latinoamérica (1930-1940) (co-advisor, University of Stockholm, March 2022)

Marta Sánchez-Salvá: El caleidoscopio salarrueño: desplazamientos y devenires en la obra literaria y pictórica de Salarrué (University of Bergen, November 2021)

Boris Badía: El neobarroco de la obra poética de J. Kozer: residuos e identidad (co-advisor, University of Havana, April 2021)

Alissa Vik: From nu huayno to música mestiza: New genres, spaces, and identities in contemporary urban fusion music in Lima (University of Bergen, January 2020)

Published teaching materials and articles in the fields of didactics

My interest in didactics and research-based teaching has resulted in the publication of nine articles in specialized journals, as well as two textbooks and one book chapter for the use in the Spanish classroom. In my research articles, I offer alternative theoretical approaches to teaching literature and culture in Spanish for non-native speakers at the university level. These publications reflect my development as a teacher in time as well.