Originally from Brazil, Dr. Ferreira is a full professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Bridgewater State University (Massachusetts, USA). She is particularly interested in language contact situations, phonological changes, and the commonalities in Ibero-Romance languages. Her doctoral dissertation (University of New Mexico) was a comparative study of Caribbean Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on the African vestige shared by these languages. She has published four books and several peer-reviewed articles in the areas of language contact and heritage language education. She incorporates her research into her teaching by fostering respect for social and regional varieties in all her language classes.