The nation’s premier Hispanic-Serving Institutions are part of a new initiative to advance teaching, research and cultural programming in the area of Hispanic humanities studies. Funded by a three-year, $5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project “Crossing Latinidades: Emerging Scholars and New Comparative Directions,” also aims to prepare rising Hispanic researchers and scholars for faculty positions in humanities studies.
The initiative is the product of a consortium based at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) which includes all 16 Hispanic-Serving Institutions, or HSIs, in the country that have the R1 designation — top tier doctoral universities with very high research activity — in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The consortium focuses its efforts on increasing the number of Hispanic doctoral students pursuing terminal degrees and advancing to academic positions.
A second part of the program is a working group that seeks to impact the field of Hispanic humanities studies with a new model of collaborative, comparative and cross-regional research to more accurately reflect the changing configurations of Hispanics in the United States.
Along with UIC, the institutional partners in the consortium are the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York; University of Arizona; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Riverside; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Santa Cruz; Florida International University; University of Central Florida; University of New Mexico; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; University of North Texas; Texas Tech University; University of Houston; the University of Texas at El Paso; and the University of Texas at Arlington.
