Dean Galindo

Dean María del Mar Galindo

(203) 432-0520
mariadelmar.galindo@yale.edu
Branford College — J13
74 High St. New Haven, CT 06511

María del Mar Galindo (María del Mar is all her first name) is a native of Querétaro, Mexico, though she has been fortunate enough to live in several countries as part of her professional and academic life. She’s passionate about helping students see college as a place where they can set their own goals and forge their own paths, and about creating tools and systems at Yale that celebrate and center students from all kinds of backgrounds. You can always contact her by email or phone; you can make an appointment to meet with her by contacting her senior administrative assistant, Jen DellaCamera (jennifer.dellacamera@yale.edu or 203-432-0520).

If you are a Branfordian you can meet with Dean Galindo more informally by catching her in the dining hall, where she tries to have breakfast and lunch several times a week in order to get to know the students in the Branford community.

Dean Galindo earned her BA in 2008 from the University of Oxford, where she read Medieval English Literature. She holds a MSc in Global Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MA and MPhil in English Literature from Yale University. Her doctoral research at Yale focuses on Shakespeare’s England.

Before returning to academia in 2016, Dean Galindo worked in international development for several years, and was lucky enough to be posted to Mexico City, Geneva, Damascus, and Accra, with brief stints in Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul. She worked on chemical weapon disarmament in Syria and was part of the Ebola epidemic response in West Africa in 2014-2015. She has also worked in consulting and in the nonprofit sector, collaborating primarily with international civil society leaders. She’s an avid traveler and has had the incredible good luck to visit over 60 countries for both work and pleasure.

At Yale, Dean Galindo has worked at the Beinecke, at the Yale Writing Center, and with the Academic Strategies Program in the Office of Educational Opportunity. She currently teaches in the English and Humanities Departments.

Outside of work, Dean Galindo loves to spend time outdoors—she once spent a month dogsledding and winter camping in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota—and gardening (not very well, though her claim to fame is once growing watermelons in her New Haven garden). She’s loved hockey from childhood, despite growing up in a country with no real hockey culture or ice, and also enjoys cooking, creative writing, reading, fantasy and sci-fi, and classic rock. She’s always on the lookout for new horror films and intriguing television shows.

Dean Galindo’s husband, Marcus Alaimo, joins her at Branford. He received his PhD in the Yale English Department in 2024; his work explores the polemical exchanges between Romantic poets and the utilitarian philosophers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and asks how poetry and political rhetoric in this period developed alongside one another and competed for cultural authority.

His family is from Oroville, California, and he’s a graduate of Butte Community College and Chico State University, where he majored in English Literature and German with a minor in Spanish. He’s taught English in Chile and South Korea, and spent a year living in Germany as an undergraduate. He teaches with Directed Studies, in the English Department, with the Yale Prison Education Initiative; he enjoys reading, writing poetry, stand-up comedy (watching, not performing!), and tennis.

They live in Branford with their two dogs: a husky mix named Alyosha (aka Chilaquil) and a corgi mix named Frijolina (“Bean” or Lina for short). Yosha is a rescue from Texas: he loves all people and all dogs, and can often be found in the office with Dean G., sleeping on his back with his legs curled up above him in a good impression of a rotisserie chicken. Lina is a Connecticut native with the energy of a much bigger dog: she very much thinks of the entirety of Branford as her personal home, and is always eager to snuggle with students (and staff) when she isn’t playing with Yosha or her cousin Ollie (Jen’s dog, who also spends most of his time in the Branford office).