• 2000 - Ph.D. in Spanish Philology/Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Madioson, Madison, Wisconsin
• 1994 - M.A. in Spanish, University of Wisconsin-Madioson, Madison, Wisconsin
• 1990 - B.S. in Business Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

Dr. Sonia Kania received her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2000). She is currently Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at UT Arlington, where she is the Director of the Spanish Program. She teaches advanced courses in Spanish language and linguistics. Dr. Kania is a collaborator in the Cbola Project, which is concerned with the edition and publication of documents of the Hispanic Southwest from the 16th-18th centuries. She is particularly interested in the History of the Spanish Language, Colonial American Spanish, and Spanish in the United States. Her research focuses on Colonial Mexican and New Mexican Spanish and historical dialectology; she has published numerous articles in those areas and is author of Mexican Spanish of the Colonial Period: Evidence from the Audiencia of New Galicia (Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2010). Most recently, she has begun researching heritage learner issues and student engagement in the heritage-learner classroom.