Laura Colantoni
Acting Vice-Dean, Faculty & Academic Life
Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Contact
Email: vicedeanacademic.artsci@utoronto.ca
Tel: 416-978-7897
Executive Assistant: Christine Yarish
Office: SS2005, Office of the Dean, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George Street
Portfolio
The Vice-Dean, Faculty & Academic Life (VDFAL) works with various partners within the Faculty to provide advice and support to Chairs, Academic Directors and Principals to manage the human and financial resources that sustain the Faculty’s academic programs. The VDFAL supports academic searches, appointments and reviews. The Vice-Dean also acts on behalf of the Faculty in managing collective agreements, bargaining and grievances with trade unions and the faculty association within the University.
Areas of Responsibility
- Professional development for faculty members
- Training and support of academic leaders in divisional processes (including onboarding new leaders, participating in training for leaders throughout the HR cycle)
- Collective agreements, divisional lead
- Labour relations, divisional lead
- Faculty issues, including critical issues
Biography
Laura Colantoni is a Professor at the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She received her BA in linguistics from the University of Buenos Aires and her PhD in Hispanic linguistics from the University of Minnesota. In 2002, Professor Colantoni joined the University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She was awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2007. In 2014, she was promoted to the rank of Professor.
Professor Colantoni’s research focuses on sound change and categorization and the second-language acquisition of variable phonetic parameters. She published an edited volume on Argentine Spanish in 2013 (Perspectivas teóricas y experimentales sobre el español de la Argentina, Iberoamericana, with C. Rodríguez Louro), and has recently published another book: Second Language Speech: An Introduction (with P. Escudero and J. Steele) with Cambridge University Press. In recent years, she has been working on several federal grants and U-of-T-supported research projects, alone and in collaboration with colleagues in French, linguistics, and speech and language pathology.
Professor Colantoni’s most recent SSHRC-funded collaborative project (A. T. Pérez-Leroux, S. Béjar, A. Cuza, E. Johnson, N. Mazzaro and J. Schertz) focuses on the impact of phonetic variability on the first-language acquisition of grammatical properties in Spanish-English bilinguals. She is also currently collaborating with A. Kochetov and J. Steele on an electropalatographic study of assimilatory patterns in English, French and Spanish as first and second languages.
Professor Colantoni has previously served as Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese (2015–2019).