The 2018-2019 academic year brought awards, events, and research news for the Institute of Ethnic Studies. Here are the highlights.
Awards
Ethnic studies has an incredible array of faculty. It is no surprise that 2018-2019 brought several awards for our members.
Joy Castro received the Willa Cather Professorship from the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor during a celebration on Nov. 13. She has been selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities' Summer Scholar program, which provides an avenue for faculty to collaborate with experts in humanities disciplines.
An excerpt of Amelia Montes' upcoming memoir was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The prize honors the best poetry, short fiction, and essays published by small presses each year.
Lory Janelle Dance received a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award.
Jeannette Eileen Jones received the Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award.
Alice Kang, won the Best Paper Award from the European Journal of Politics and Gender. She shares the award with her co-author Peace Medie, University of Bristol, for their article "Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Gender in the Global South."
Research
Along with awards, several in our community published and presented their research this year.
Dawne Curry and Amelia Montes presented their experiences in the Fulbright program on Jan. 23. Curry earned a Fulbright to South Africa, where she researched the role of women in the country's political system. Montes taught graduate courses in American literary studies and theory in the former Yugoslavia. Both were abroad during the 2017-2018 academic year.
Jeannette Jones earned a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The fellowship awards a $50,000 stipend, which will help support the writing of her next book, “America in Africa: U.S. Empire, Race and the African Question, 1821-1919.” Also, Jones and her team received $196,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for “To Enter Africa from America: The United States, Africa, and the New Imperialism, 1862–1919.” The award will fund research and preparation of an online resource and print publication about United States engagement with Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Joy Castro, Jeannette Jones, Kenneth Price (English), and Will Thomas (History) received one of five 2019 Digital Extension Grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for their digital project "New Storytellers: The Research Institute in Digital Ethnic Studies.”
Events
Not only did our faculty share their research, but we brought other scholars and leaders to the university campus to share their work with our students.
Fall
We hosted a digital humanities forum titled “New Storytellers: Digital Ethnic Studies” on Oct. 25-26 where we welcomed emerging and innovative digital humanities scholars from minority-serving institutions. Ten colleges and universities were asked to select two participants to attend the forum.
On November 15th we welcomed Dr. Kim TallBear. She gave a lecture titled “Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society: Toward Sovereign Bodies and Sustainable Relations.”
Spring
On January 25, 2019 we hosted Dr. Eugenio Di Stefano, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture, University of Nebraska Omaha who gave a talk "The Indexical Century: Cinematic Form and the Mexican Present in Carlos Reygadas’s Japón."
Our annual Spring Celebration was centered on South African history. On April 8th, we hosted two free film screenings, “The Wound” and “Five Fingers for Marseilles”. As our keynote lecture, Dr. Holly McGee of the University of Cincinnati gave a lecture on April 10th titled “ ‘One Day We are Going Home’: The Long Exile of Elizabeth Mafeking.”
Thank you to all of our faculty, staff, students, and guests who were a part of our school year. We look forward to the fall and continuing to provide our community with a stellar educational experience.
