2016-17 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellows

Dr. Nichole M. Garcia is Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Social Science and Comparative Education with a specialization in Race and Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research employs mixed methods to examine inaccurate portrayals of educational outcomes for communities of color. In doing so, institutions of higher education can plan appropriate programs and evidence-based interventions to meet the growing needs of students. Nichole was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon dissertation fellowship for which she completed a comparative study on Chicana/o and Puerto Rican college-educated families to advance narratives of intergenerational achievement and college readiness. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania she was engaged with RISE (Research, Integration, Strategies, and Evaluation) for boys and men of color which is a field advancement effort to understand and strategically improve the lives, experiences, and outcomes of these populations. She collaboratively built an online repository of data disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and sex spanning five fields (education, health, human services and social policy, juvenile and criminal justice, and workforce development).

Dr. Amanda E. Gray Rendón is a George E. Burch Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History, Division of Medicine & Science,Smithsonian Institution. She was previously a Medical Humanities Predoctoral Teaching Fellow at Earlham College. She earned her BA in legal studies and sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MA in American studies and Mexican American studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship explores the experiences of predominantly Mexican and Mexican American caregivers, home healthcare workers, and home health practitioners in Texas through an analysis of federal and state healthcare policy, labor laws, and community cultural practices. She examines the historically gendered and racialized labor force of the fastest growing industry in the United States utilizing oral history and feminist methodologies to promote spaces of visibility and community collaboration. Her research, documentary film work, and digital humanities projects have been supported by the Inter-University Program for Latino Research / Andrew G. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, The HASTAC Scholars Fellowship, Louann Atkins Temple Fellowship in American Studies, and the College of Liberal Arts Humanities Media Project Grant at The University of Texas at Austin. In addition to her academic projects, she has produced, directed, and edited several short documentary films focused on art, education, community activism, and environmental justice. She developed her most recent documentary project entitled “Home” while living with her grandmother and great grandmother with end stage Alzheimer’s disease. Her commitment to social justice and accessible community-based knowledge production is a core principle of her scholarship and pedagogy.

Dr. Luis Guzmán Valerio earned his Ph.D. in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He defended his dissertation titled “Perspectives from the Streets and the Classrooms in the Same ‘Hood: Linguistic Landscapes of Sunset Park, Brooklyn” in Spring 2018. In addition to teaching Spanish, Dr. Guzmán has directed his intellectual endeavors to translating, copyediting, and creative writing. Since Fall 2022, Dr. Guzmán has been a Doctoral Lecturer at LaGuardia Community College. For the 2023-24 academic year, he was awareded a PSC-CUNY Cycle 54 Research Grant. His creative writing can be found in Pájaros, lesbianas y queers… ¡a volar! An LGBTQ+ Anthology of Dominican Transnational Writers and in the 2024 issue of Latino Book Review Magazine. His translations have appeared in Latin American Literature Today.

Dr. Vanessa Guridy received her PhD in the Political Science Department at the University of Illinois Chicago. She has worked as a researcher in various studies, including the Consular Advocacy and Latino Immigrant Worker Rights Project, and was Director of Field Research for the 2011 Chicago Area Study. Her dissertation analyses Latino political participation, exploring the nuanced diversity within the Latino category and how these differences are impacted by local context. Specifically, her work aims to rupture the script of a monolithic Latino politics, highlighting the ways social and cultural capital interact with local context to influence political behavior.

Dr. Laura Kaplan completed her doctorate in the Urban Education Program at the Graduate Center, CUNY in September 2018 and is Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education at the School of Education at Pace University, New York City. Her research centers on the Latino Civil Rights Movement in New York City, specifically the struggles for social justice and bilingual education in the South Bronx in the 1960s. Her dissertation, “P.S. 25, South Bronx: Bilingual Education and Community Control” examines how through grassroots organization, the Puerto Rican community created a multicultural bilingual school to serve its children. P.S. 25 became the first Spanish-English public bilingual elementary school in the entire Northeast and developed an additive model of education that influenced future bilingual education programs in New York City and beyond.

Dr. Jose Manuel Castellanos is Clinical Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Arrupe College of the Loyola University at Chicago and the Director of the Writing Fellows Center. He received his Ph.D. in the Department of English at UIC. He received his Master’s degree at Illinois State University where he served as President of The Association of Latin American Students (ALAS). Jose has also served as a youth gang mentor under the Lincoln’s Challenge Project. His dissertation work involved ethnographic research conducted among Chicago’s working-class Latino community, focusing on how the rhetoric of Latinidad is mobilized to navigate everyday experiences of loss that occur in Hispanic enclaves.

Dr. Ralph Cintrón (Jose Castellanos),University of Illinois Chicago
Dr. Cary Cordova (Amanda Gray), University of Texas-Austin
Dr. Arlene Dávila (Vanessa Guridy), New York University
Dr. Johanna Fernández (Laura Kaplan), Baruch College
Dr. Edwin Lamboy (Luis Guzman Valerio), The City College of New York
Dr. Daniel Solórzano (Nichole Garcia), UCLA