María Leonor Márquez Ponce, PhD Student, Captures Latinx higher eduction experiences.

The Educator Award honors an innovative teacher/professor who has published and/or used a significant body of OER over a sustained period (at least one year) in his/her teaching practice. An individual whose open course materials and professional practices have been recognized as having an impact and influencing peers to share more openly

Two precious and well-travelled books containing works by the Mexican nun, writer, composer, poet and proto-feminist Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz have been saved from auction in New York and returned to Spain, where they were printed almost three-and-a-half centuries ago.

Taking Brazil’s new Black cinema as its point of departure, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora brings together filmmakers, artists, scholars, and critics from across the globe in order to inaugurate a practice of collective attunement. How can we best attune ourselves to the waves set in motion by this new cinema? How does Brazil’s current Black cinema resonate within contemporary aesthetic practices of the Black diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, North America and Europe? In what ways do these new formations of global cinemas refract our understanding of the post-colonial and of diaspora?

Our Sawyer Seminar draws from both critical perspectives and creative work in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to address how race and ethnicity have been represented historically. Through yearlong conversation and four exciting public symposia, we’ll consider how comics reflect and shape understanding of race and ethnicity in specific times and places.

For Maria Leonor Márquez Ponce, a Humanities for the Public Good internship at the University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives is more than a summer gig—it’s also a way to connect with her own past and to find inspiration for her future. “Sometimes looking back at history can surprise you. You learn so much and you are inspired by it,” Márquez Ponce shared. Considering that she never believed that a college degree would be attainable for her, much less a PhD, she has found a deep connection to this project and the people whose stories she is sharing.

Horacio Castellanos Moya, MFA in Spanish Creative Writing professor, publishes "El hombre amansado", Literatura Random House, 2022.

Invited by the Institute of Hispanic American Literature of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Horacio Castellanos Moya will talk about his work with academics Noé Jitrik (UBA), Celina Manzoni (UBA), Ezequiel de Rosso (UBA), Magdalena Perkovska (Hunter College), Marta Waldegaray (University of Reims Champagne), Alexandra Ortiz Wallner (University of Costa Rica) and Emanuela Jossa (University of Calabria).

Originally set to study abroad in Peru in fall 2020, Kristin Vogel, a senior undergraduate student pursuing a BA in anthropology and Spanish with a minor in history, found herself in a waiting game due to COVID-19. “My travel plans kept getting pushed back due to COVID,” said Vogel. “After a while, they finally said we were not able to travel to Peru as it was too much of a health safety risk given how the pandemic was playing out.”