Profile

Professor Balbuena was a Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University before joining the Clark Honors College in 2004. In addition to her teaching in the honors college, she is a participating faculty in the Comparative Literature and Romance Languages departments. Professor Balbuena is also active with the Jewish Studies program, where she sits on the executive committee; the Latin American Studies program, for which she served as interim director in 2014-15; and the Women and Gender Studies program. She is a member of the Center for the Study of Women in Society's Women of Color Project, sits on the executive board for the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, is chair of the Curriculum Committee in the University Senate, and is extremely active with the university's Global Studies Institute, where she participates in working groups on Brazil, Israel, and translation.

Outside of the university, Balbuena sits on the editorial boards of The Journal of Jewish Identities, The Levantine Review, and The Journal for the Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry. She is editor of modern literature for The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Balbuena is fluent in Portuguese, English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Ladino and Italian, and has functional knowledge in Arabic, Catalan, Galician, and Yiddish.