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What do you teach at Ca’ Foscari? What are your main research interests? 
My name is Florencio del Barrio de la Rosa and I was born in Valladolid (Spain) in 1978. After graduating in Hispanic Philology, I obtained my PhD at my hometown university in 2004, with a dissertation on Old Spanish syntax. I have been teaching at Ca' Foscari since 2008, where I arrived as a University Researcher and became an Associate Professor in 2015. My research interests are varied and concern different aspects and levels of the Spanish language, in its synchronic and diachronic components, approached from multiple perspectives. Right now my research focuses, on the one hand, on word formation in a contrastive key with Italian and, on the other, on the historical dialectology of Spanish language varieties.

What are your professional role models / references?
University lecturers have to divide their time among three activities: teaching, research and administration. Teaching and research, which are closely related areas, must be given the lion's share, but a well-rounded lecturer must not neglect administration and help with running the department or university. There are references for each of these activities. I learn a lot from my older and wiser colleagues and I listen to them; even from my closest colleagues I appreciate their seriousness and their responsible attitude. In short, I learn from those who, in each of these three activities, have something to teach me. Even from negative examples I try to learn how not to behave!

Have you always known that this was going to be your path?
Yes, I always thought that this was my direction, so I was determined to become a university lecturer to teach and research Spanish. Working in the academic world means I can dedicate myself to my studies, which is my real interest, and if I can convey this interest to the students, then I am satisfied. I find that approaching a subject with the sole aim of passing an exam or obtaining the required credits is very limiting; the real aim should be to learn. Passing the exam would then be the direct consequence of learning.

What does teaching and researching mean to you?
For me, they are two closely related activities. University lecturers must be able to bring the results of their research into the classroom and adapt them to their audience, and they must also be able to engage in fields they do not specialise in. In short, study must be a priority for university lecturers; before teaching, you must learn. We language lecturers must especially show a high level of "research-making", since our teaching activity cannot and must not be limited to teaching language as a tool, but as a subject of study. Reducing language teaching to an instrumental purpose would mean wasting the high scientific value of language lecturers.

The area you have always wanted to be involved in but have not yet had the opportunity to explore?
In researching the Spanish language, I have dealt with the most diverse topics. If I look at my scientific production, I find publications on literary language, on pragmatics, on historical syntax, on Spanish theoretical linguistics, on both sociolinguistic and dialectal varieties of the Hispanic world in America and Spain, on different contrastive phenomena between Spanish and Italian and on other topics related to Spanish from a global perspective. Although my production is varied, there are still areas to be explored, such as, for instance, experimental research applied to the Spanish language or tackling the philological edition of a text.