Faith Mishina

Faculty Information

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Email: mishina@hawaii.edu

Office: K242

faith mishina

Dr. Faith Mishina is a lover of languages, cultures, literatures and linguistics. She has a doctorate in Modern Languages, first language Spanish and the second language French. She attended Middlebury, one of the foremost institutions of language learning in the U.S. She also has two Master's degrees, one in Spanish and one in French. She has spent a lot of time abroad in educational institutions in Spain, France, Mexico and Argentina, learning in their schools from their perspectioves.

Her doctoral dissertation is on the Nobel Priza laureate of literature, Gabriel García Márquez. His political novels place emphasis on the pervasive injustices of colonial control and aftermath in Latin America throughout the twentieth century. Faith's articles of reaserch place emphasis on the opposition of the postcolonial versus the colonial perspective, and the architectures of deception in the struggle for power. Her published articles address these perspectives in four of García Márquez's novels. She is currently writing a book on postcolonial aftermath in Colombia and the influence of García Márquez's postcolonial position on Colombia.

Faith grew up in Japan, attending Japanese schools until she was in Jr. High when she was placed in a diplomatic school in which she needed three languages. Consequently, she is a believer that a language reflects the culture, a fact gleaned from her own personal experiences in language immersion in different countries. Thus her language classes contain a strong cultural component and an emphasis on the Latin and Hispanic perspective in this global world. In course Spanish 102 and all succeeding classes, she uses award winning movies to teach culture perspective while the students write summaries in Spanish using whole language for their final exams.