Spring 2025 Office Hours

T 3-4 pm, W 12-1 pm, R 9-10 am

Other hours by appointment.

Email me anytime during the semester, for any reason. I will respond to your email within 24 hours M-F, and within 72 hours on the weekends. I don't have a phone in my office. 

Courses Taught in Spring 2025: WLS 3012; WLS 1101; 1112-600 (online)

Prof. Irene Jacobsen was born in Córdoba, Argentina, to parents who loved to read. Her first exposure to a foreign language occurred in kindergarten (Spanish in the morning, German in the afternoon). At age seven she moved to Montreal, Canada, where her father worked as a U.N. translator, thus bringing forth her second exposure to a foreign language, French. After graduation from secondary school, following the wise advice of her parents, she switched to the English school system and earned a B.A. in Sociology from McGill University (1989). Eventually she followed in her mother's footsteps and decided to study Spanish and Latin American literature, which led to a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (2002). In 2007 her linguistic odyssey came full circle when she married a native from Germany, an event that reignited her interest in German.

Prof. Jacobsen's frequently taught courses include Beginning Spanish I (WLS 1101); Spanish for the Health Professions (WLS 1112, online); Medical Spanish for Health Care and Allied Fields (WLS 3012); Spanish Through Latin American Narrative and Film (WLS 3010 / 3090); and Civilization and Culture of Spanish America (WLS 4320). 

For a decade, Prof. Jacobsen's conference papers and articles focused on issues common to women writers, such as censorship, and the textual strategies they imagined to circumvent them. In the past few years the focus of her research shifted towards the intersection of the picaresque (an early modern Spanish literary genre) novel with Tango lyrics (a subgenre of Argentine poetry). For this project she is busy translating numerous Tango-songs from the River Plate variety of Spanish (peppered with lunfardo, a local lexicon) to standard English. In 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2018 and 2019 she lectured on the Tango at eight different universities (including in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Medellín, Colombia; and Lima, Peru).