This is Dr. William A. Nericcio, the director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences program at SDSU. This blog posting is an experiment to see if we can use public and private philanthropy to fund our graduate student travel initiative. Delivering paper at conferences here and abroad is a key element of the graduate student experience.
Your donations will help our MALAS graduate students to share their unique, dynamic, interdisciplinary research findings with their peers and with other scholars across the globe. Be generous if you can!
MALAS, the Master of Art in Liberal Arts and Sciences at SDSU, is proud to announce a Chavela Vargas predoctoral fellow program for 2012-2013. The recently deceased Chavela Vargas (video below) was a groundbreaking international artist whose work in music, social justice, and gender politics made dramatic contributions to culture and justice on both sides of the Rio Grande river and beyond. It is this singular, dynamic, and boundary-crossing/breaking ability that set Vargas apart from other entertainers and why MALAS elected to grace our first predoctoral fellow program with her name.
Frida Kahlo and Chavela Vargas
Our selected fellow for 2012-13 is a remarkable graduate student from the Spanish section of the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan: Laura Herbert. Ms. Herbert is presently working on her dissertation, "The Post-NAFTA Intersections of Culture, Market,
Nation and Gender on the US-Mexico Border" with her supervisory team of professors: Gareth Williams (chair), Colin
Gunckel, and Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes.
Congratulations to Laura Herbert and welcome to SDSU and to MALAS. Herbert will be sitting-in and guest lecturing in MALAS seminars throughout the Fall and Spring and will lecturing on her research at a date to be determined.
Biography
Laura M. Herbert
I am a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan in
Romance Languages honored to be the MALAS Chavela Vargas predoctoral fellow for
2012-2013. My thesis focuses on how national mythologies in the United States
and Mexico have shifted under the current neoliberal paradigm and how these mythologies
mobilize and manipulate certain forms of embodiment. I am particularly
interested in the telenovela industry and the work of Roberto Bolaño. I
received my B.A. summa cum laude in 2007 from the Ohio State University and in
2008 I began my graduate work in 2008 at Michigan where I am the very fortunate
recipient of the Jacob K. Javits fellowship. When I´m not studying, I´m into
cooking and yoga!
Here are some of Laura's recent doings:
Upcoming:
“Nosotras versus We:
Translating the Implicit Feminism in Pensamientos,
prácticas y acciones del GAC,” Translating Intersectionality: Language and
the Politics of Multilingual Feminist Solidarities. National Women´s Studies
Association Annual Meeting. Oakland California. November 2012.
Past:
“2666’s Literary Mass Grave: Historical Memory and Bolaño on
the Border,” Mapping the Mexican Borderlands Seminar, American Comparative
Literature Association Annual Meeting.Providence, Rhode Island.March 2012.
“When Exports and Diasporas Collide: La Reina del Sur and
the Melodrama of Mexican Nationalism,” The Female Body, Gender and Identity in
21st Century Latin America Panel, Northeast Modern Language Association Annual
Meeting.Rochester, New York.March 2012.
“The Narco Nouveau- Riche: Class Identity and Narco dollars
in Colombian Bestsellers” (retiled “Of Sicarios and Prepagos: The Consuming in
and of Colombian Narconovelas”), First Seminar on the Narco Imaginary, American
Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting. Vancouver, Canada.March 2011.
“Queering the Barrio: Gay Chican@s and the Construction of
Liberatory Space,” Spaces and Identity Panel, Spaces of Relation Conference.
University of Miami.Miami,
Florida.February 2011.
Organized Conference
Seminar:
Translating Intersectionality: Language and the Politics of
Multilingual Feminist Solidarities (co-chaired with Catalina Esguerra-Metheny
and Jocelyn Frelier). National Women´s Studies Association Annual Meeting.
Oakland California. November 2012.
Mapping the Mexican Borderlands
(co-chaired with Paige Rafoth), American Comparative Literature
Association Annual Meeting.
Providence, Rhode Island.
March 2012.
Help us celebrate out Silver anniversary! If you had some role in the creation of MALAS, have taught a seminar for us, or have had some hand in MALAS's development, or are one of our present students or alumni, don't be shy about leaving us a comment below!
Dafne Muntanyola-Saura has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2008), where she is currently teaching Sociology of Mass Culture and Ethnographical Methods. She has been an MA student at Stockholm University, and a postdoc reseracher in Nice and Madrid. As a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at the department of Cognitive Science at UCSD she has participated in Dance and Cognition, an interdisciplinary project with the Wayne McGregor-Random Dance company. She translated Cicourel (2007) and Kirsh (2007) into Spanish.Her current research crosses over the fields of contemporary cognitive science (embodied and distributed cognition) and ethnography (Muntanyola, 2010, 2012, & Kirsh, 2010). She studies expert and creative teamwork in different work environments, such as hospitals, dance rehearsals and synchronized swimming.
Address : Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Campus Bellaterra, E-08193 Barcelona, España (dafne.muntanyola@uab.cat).
MALAS, the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences at San Diego State University, is honored to have in residence this late Summer and early Fall, the one and only Dr. Simone Belli, of Spain by way of Italy. Dr. Belli will be lecturing on his diverse body of research in the first MALAS 601 seminar this Fall 2012, Wednesday, August 29, 2012 (3:30pm-6:10pm in LSN-134). Here's more information concerning the work of Dr. Belli:
click to enlarge
Simone Belli (Bergamo-Italia, 1981) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universidad Autónoma University de Madrid. He received his Ph.D. (Doctor Europeus) in Social Psychology from Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona with the thesis 'Emotions and Language', directed by Lupicinio Íñiguez Rueda. He is member of MIRCo Research Group (Multilingualism, Social
Identities, Intercultural Relations and Communication), GESCIT Research Group (Social Studies in Science and Technology), JovenTIC Research Group, and of the Centre of Discourse Studies (CED). Sponsored by the Spanish Department of Education and Science, he worked as a predoctoral fellow at Georgetown University at Washington, DC, The University of Manchester, and at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also served as a visiting Professor at the University of Bergamo in Italy. His research is focused on the relationship of emotions with language, and how it is possible to express these emotions through the use of Information Technology and Communication (ICT).
