Rey Romero earned a Ph.D. in Spanish linguistics from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He completed B.A. degrees in Spanish language, Linguistics, and French language at Rice University in Houston, TX. His main areas of research are Spanish dialectology, Spanish in contact with non-Romance languages, and Heritage speakers of Spanish. He has presented his research in several national and international conferences such as New Ways of Analyzing Variation, International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Association of the Southwest, the Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, and others. He has published articles on Judeo-Spanish in conference proceedings and in Ianua Revista Philologica Romanica. In 2007 he received a travel grant from the Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, DC to analyze the maintenance of Judeo-Spanish in the Prince Islands off the coast of Istanbul. This research was published in 2011 as a chapter in Cortazar and Orozco’s Lenguaje, arte y revoluciones ayer y hoy: New Approaches to Hispanic Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Studies. In 2012, he received a grant from his university’s Organized Research Committee to document the Judeo-Spanish varieties spoken in New York City.
Dr. Rey Romero is currently Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston-Downtown, where he teaches Spanish linguistics and translation, as well as Spanish courses for heritage speakers.