Kelly Comfort, Assistant Professor of Spanish in the School of Modern Languages has been named recipient of Georgia Tech's 2010 BP/CETL Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. Her creativity in teaching has been highlighted by her highly successful service learning and internship courses that require students to work and speak Spanish in Atlanta's Hispanic communities.

The CETL/BP Teaching Excellent Awards are institute-wide awards symbolizing Georgia Tech's commitment to promoting exemplary teaching. Comfort will be honored on Georgia Tech's Student Honor's Day in April. She and other awardees will be honored at a luncheon hosted by CETL in March.

Comfort earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis. In addition to designing and teaching the Spanish service-learning and internship courses, she has taught classes at Georgia Tech on Spanish conversation and Latin American literature. She also co-taught the Intercultural Seminar Capstone Course. Comfort is faculty advisor of the GT student organization "Gringos y Latinos: Atlanta's Spanish Service Society" (G.L.A.S.S.S.).

Comfort's research and teaching interests include the figure of the artist in modernist fiction, the topic of nation-building in Latin American literature, the literary and philosophic movement of aestheticism, and the Latin American short story. She has lived and studied in Spain, Ecuador, Germany, and Australia. Comfort has published a number of papers. Her most recent is "The Clash of the Foreign and the Local in Mart and Carpentier: From " Misplaced Ideas' to " Transculturation' in Hipertexto." Her book European Aestheticism and Spanish American Modernismo: Artist Protagonists and the Philosophy of Art for Art's Sake is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.