Jermani Ojeda-Ludena Awarded a 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship

The Native American and Indigenous Studies Program is proud to announce that our NAIS graduate affiliate Jermani Ojeda-Ludena has been awarded a 2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Ojeda-Ludena has been recognized as one of 45 awardees, selected from a pool of nearly 700 applicants through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review.

At UT Austin, Jermani Ojeda-Ludena is doing his PhD in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures through the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He has been a leading member of our NAIS community. In 2022-2023, he co-chaired the NAIS-sponsored graduate student organization Native American and Indigenous Peoples Association (NAIPA).

Ojeda-Ludena’s research explores Quechua people’s oral rhetoric on broadcasting. Jermani utilizes the Quechua Radio Praxis as a methodological, theoretical, and ethical approach based on indigenous knowledge of communication. This analyzes Quechua broadcasters’ biographies and their radio programs as the record of their sonorous, communal, and personal lives at the intersection of critical indigenous, indigenous media, voice and sound, and settler colonial studies. At UT Austin, Ojeda-Ludena iswriting his disseration under the supervision of professor Luis Cárcamo-Huechante and his dissertation committee is composed of professors Kelly McDonough and Lorraine Leu (UT Austin), and Leila Gómez (University of Colorado-Boulder). 

For more information on the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship and the co-hort of which Ojeda-Ludena is part, click here. The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships are designed to intervene at the formative stage of dissertation development and promote research methodologies, project formats, and areas of inquiry that challenge traditional norms of doctoral education. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Congratulations to Jermani Ojeda-Ludena!

April 25, 2023

Congratulations to Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz!

Sheyda is a a portfolio student with NAIS at the Department of Art and Art History and has recently been awarded two prizes for their recent papers.

 The first is the Rhonda A. Saad Prize for Best Paper in Modern and Contemporary Arab Art, which was awarded by the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) for their paper titled "To Twist a Historical Knot: Projects of Pan-Arabism, Hurufiyya, and Amazighism." The prize recognizes and promotes excellence in the field of modern and contemporary Arab art, and is awarded to a graduate student or recent post-doctoral scholar working in any discipline whose paper is judged to provide the most significant contribution to the disciplines of Art History and Middle East Studies. 

The second is the Mark Tessler Graduate Student Prize Award, which was awarded by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS) for their paper titled "Phantom Images, Residual Violences: An Unlooking and Untelling of Marc Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960." The prize is named in honor of Professor Mark Tessler and is awarded to graduate students who have delivered papers in the field of Maghrib studies before a professional audience at the departmental, university, regional, or national level.

Congratulations to Jessica Sánchez Flores!

Jessica has accepted a tenure track position at Colorado College in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. At Colorado College, she will have the opportunity to teach, and continue to develop her research agenda related to contemporary Indigenous cultural and literary self-representations of womanhood.

Big shout out to the committee members for their support these past years: 

Dr. Kelly McDonough (chair)

Dr. Luis Carcamo-Huechante

Dr. Laura Gutierrez 

Dr. Héctor Domínguez-Rubalcaba

¡Ica yolpaquiliztli, Jessi! ¡Felicidades, Jessi! 

Congratulations to Ruth Matamoros!

Ruth will be joining the Geography Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Geographies. 

Her research engages in critical discussions of land politics and indigeneity by examining Miskitu People’s territorial resistance as a native response to land dispossession in the context of colonial power relations. Her dissertation calls for a decolonizing framework to address Indigenous Peoples’ land rights struggles, acknowledging their unique knowledge systems, which view the world as an interdependent unity of human and non-human.

Also a recognition of the important support of her Dissertation Committee:

Advisor-Professor Luis Carcamo-Huechante. Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Professor Carlos Ramos-Scharrón. Department of Geography and the Environment

Professor Pavithra Vasudevan. AADS and WGS

Professor Edmundo T. Gordon. AADS 

External member. Professor Sharlene Mollett. The University of Toronto.