Raised in Santiago, Chile, Jill Syverson-Stork graduated with honors in Hispanic Studies from Smith College and received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages from Harvard University. Jill also attended Dartmouth College as a 12-College Exchange student from Smith, and studied at the University of Salamanca, Spain, with the Dartmouth Foreign Language Study program.

Since 1989, Professor Syverson-Stork has been a member of the Spanish Department at Wellesley College. Jill serves as Faculty Director of Casa Cervantes, Wellesley’s Spanish language house, and enjoys teaching courses at all levels of the curriculum. Jill’s passion is the integration of art in the teaching of language and culture, and she collaborates with the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley to forge relationships between our students, our courses, and the Davis. The works of Miguel de Cervantes—author of Don Quixote—and the history, literature, and art of the Spanish Golden Age are Jill’s areas of specialization. Language acquisition is another field of professional interest. Over the course of her career, Jill has taught Spanish language and culture at all grade levels, in the continental U.S. and in Puerto Rico, where she briefly lived with her husband--attorney, author, and youth advocate, Francisco Stork--and their family.

Jill Syverson-Stork is the author of Theatrical Aspects of the Novel: A Study of Don Quixote, and translator and author of professional articles on Hispanic literature, history, and film. Jill has collaborated with Wellesley colleagues on several publications: as a contributing writer for Reflejos (Houghton Mifflin), an Intermediate level Spanish language program, and as co-author of Los pollitos dicen/The Baby Chicks Sing (Little, Brown), a bilingual collection of traditional songs and rhymes from Spanish speaking countries. From 2006 – 2011, Dr. Syverson-Stork served as an Independent Director of Quepasa.com--a social networking site for Latinos in the United States, Brazil, and throughout the Spanish-speaking world—and is currently Executive Director, USA, of Programa de Estudios Hispánicos en Córdoba, a consortium program of international study of which Wellesley College is a founding member.