2015-16 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellows

Dr. Tatiana Reinoza is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in the history of printmaking within the field of Latinx art. Her writing has appeared in Archives of American Art Journal; alter/nativas: latin american cultural studies journal; Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, edited anthologies, and exhibition catalogues such as ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. Her book Reclaiming the Americas: Latinx Art and the Politics of Territory was published by the University of Texas Press in 2023 She also co-edited an anthology with Karen Mary Davalos titled Self Help Graphics at Fifty: A Cornerstone of Latinx Art and Collaborative Artmaking that was published by the University of California Press. In 2016, she received her PhD in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin with the completion of her dissertation “Latino Print Cultures in the US, 1970-2008,” which received the support of the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellowship. Her work has also been recognized by the Association of Print Scholars with the Schulman and Bullard Article Prize, and the Latin American Studies Association Visual Culture Section Best Essay Prize. She is currently at work on a new book project titled Retorno: Art & Kinship in the Making of a Central American Diaspora.

Dr. Ryan Mann-Hamilton is Associate Professor at Fiorello H. LaGuardia Community College/CUNY and Co-Director of the Center for the Americas at CUNY LaGuardia. He received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, and holds an undergraduate degree in International Business and a Masters in Environmental Science with a focus on renewable technologies. His doctoral dissertation focused on the processes, effects and community reactions to state driven economic development and land dispossession in Samaná, Dominican Republic. He is an educator, community organizer, photographer, consultant and writer and has taught courses in history, anthropology and ethnic studies and given a variety of workshops and lectures on social and environmental justice, community based activism, the social constructions of race and AfroLatin@ History and Culture in the Americas. He is currently the Director of Public Programs for the Institute for Socio-Ecological Research and a board member and organizer with the Mayaguez Childrens Library.​

Dr. Yvette Martínez-Vu is a Chicana mother-scholar who works as an academic coach and consultant. She has a Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA. She is the producer and host of the Grad School Femtoring podcast and founder of Grad School Femtoring, LLC where she empowers first-generation students of color as they navigate higher education. Dr. Martinez-Vu is also a proud mom of two. She recently transitioned out of academia after working in higher ed for over ten years and while juggling homeschooling, caring for an infant, and managing a chronic illness during the pandemic. She has relocated her family from California to Portugal where she continues to femtor first-gen scholars while abroad.

Dr. Marilu Medrano is Research and Instructional Technology Consultant (RITC) at the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities. She received her PhD in the Department of English at UCLA. Her dissertation was titled “Performance and Mestizaje in 20th/21st Century Literature of the Americas.” Other interests include developing video games with narratives geared towards reimagining the Americas and its untold (lesser known) stories.

Dr. Ana Baez is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Chicago State University. She received her BA from Northwestern University in 2007 and her PhD in Hispanic and Italian Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2017. Her teaching and research interests include twentieth and twenty-first Hispanic Caribbean, Latin American, and Latinx literary, visual and cultural representations as well as literary and critical theory, new materialism, postcolonial theory, and the politics of literature. Her dissertation, “Aesthetic Interruptions: Images, Figures, and Form in Twenty-first Century Hispanic Caribbean Literary and Visual Art,” traces contemporary aesthetic challenges to normative conceptions of community in post-1989 literary and visual art of the Hispanic Caribbean. Ana is currently working on two related projects, which delve into the ethics of writing in Hispanic Caribbean aesthetic production, and Latinx literature.

Dr. Ariel Arnau received his PhD in 2018 from the City University of New York in History. His dissertation, “Suing for Spanish: Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, and Legal Activism in the 1970s” traced a series of cases initiated by Puerto Ricans lawyers and activists in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago which resulted in bilingual elections for all language minorities. He is currently adjuncting at two different universities in Philadelphia.