Ten University of New Mexico graduate students are attending the National Humanities Center’s Graduate Student Residency virtual program this week. The selected students are the inaugural cohort of a pilot collaboration between Graduate Studies and the National Humanities Center, located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, to bolster the scholarly and pedagogical expertise of UNM’s doctoral students in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences.

The NHC’s 2022 summer program focuses on Meaningful Teaching and Learning in the Humanities Classroom. The week-long remote residency program introduced and modeled instructional strategies, teaching practices, and emerging pedagogical resources specifically for humanities instruction. The program also addresses career and professionalization practices to prepare early career humanities and humanistic social science scholars and educators for post-doctoral work. 

Jesse Alemán, English Professor and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies

“The collaboration between UNM and the NHC is a great opportunity for our doctoral students to share, develop, and enhance their considerable pedagogical research and training,” associate dean Jesse Alemán said. “And it’s also an exceptional resource for networking, professionalization, and building pedagogical and scholarly experience in humanities-related fields.”

Graduate Studies fully funded the registration costs of 10 doctoral students who were selected to attend from a pool of department-nominated candidates. The students represent a cross-section of UNM’s strengths in Humanities programming. Selected participants include Thatcher Rogers, Anthropology; Brandy Reeves, English; Jorge Hernandez, Spanish; Peter Mwangi, Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies; Dominic Harrison, Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies; Edrea Mendoza, History; Tomide Oloruntobi, Communication and Journalism; Naif Masrahi, Language Literacy and Sociocultural Studies; Emma Mincks, English; and Cara Greene, Philosophy.

Learn more about each participant here

“Graduate Studies is happy to support such a large contingent of highly talented doctoral students,” said Dean Julie Coonrod, who noted that students joined colleagues from institutions like Penn State University, University of California Davis, UC Riverside, Vanderbilt, and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The National Humanities Center houses a variety of research opportunities for faculty and graduate students in the Humanities, and Alemán, a professor of English, hopes this is the first of an extended collaboration between UNM and the NHC. 

“Humanities research, pedagogies, and practices are probably now more important than ever in our social moment, and I’m excited to see our graduate students participating on a national scale,” Alemán said.

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