Gina Scarpete Walters

An advocate for linguistic and cultural diversity and less commonly taught languages, Gina Scarpete Walters completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Culture and Language, with a thesis titled 'Metaphors of the HEART in Romanian, Modern Greek, and Albanian. A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Study of Emotion and Meaning.' During her graduate studies, she was the recipient of several awards, fellowships, and grants, two of which were the 2022 NFMLTA-NCOLCTL Graduate Research Support Grant and the Title VIII Fellowship (2023). Her main research interests lie in cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, Balkan linguistics, more specifically, conceptualizations of body part terms in culturally specific ways (human body metaphors, emotion metaphors, the universality of metaphors, and variation in metaphors both across and within cultures), figurative language in foreign language instruction, cross-cultural semantics and lexicology.

Gina also served as a Graduate Teaching Associate of Linguistics in the School of International Letters and Cultures at ASU. Prior to her arrival at ASU, Gina served as a graduate teaching assistant for the Department of Modern Greek Studies and Classical Philology at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she taught Modern Greek. She did a Master's thesis on qualitative classifiers in old Romanian documents (16th-18th centuries) (written in Romanian) and another on idioms about the human body in Modern Greek and Romanian (written in Modern Greek), both at the University of Bucharest. 

She holds two Graduate Certificates in Psychopedagogy, with a focus on teaching Modern Greek as a Foreign/Second Language and Romanian as a First Language, from the Teacher Training Department of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (University of Bucharest); and a Certificate of language skills in Modern Greek issued by the Ministry of Education of Greece, through the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Gina is also a certified Modern Greek and English translator, authorized by the Romanian Ministry of Justice. 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0226-0354

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