Rolando ArleneThe Department of Latina/Latino Studies celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2006 with the inauguration of the annual Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Jr. Lecture Series. Professor Hinojosa-Smith is a University of Illinois alumnus, a distinguished scholar in the field of Latino studies and an internationally renowned author. He received his PhD in English from the University of Illinois in 1969. He was awarded an Alumni Achievement Award by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1988 and an Alumni Achievement Award by the University Alumni Association in 1998. He is currently the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor in Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in American literature, creative writing, Mexican-American literature and culture, Chicano literature, and life and literature of the Southwest. Hinojosa-Smith’s publications include more than a dozen novels as well as other works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry written in English and Spanish. Because of his illustrious career and his significant contributions to the fields of Chicano Studies and Latino Studies, the Department's annual lecture series was renamed in his honor as part of our tenth anniversary celebration. Each academic year the Department invites one or two prominent Latino scholars, writers, or artists to give a public lecture as part of this series.

Past Series guests:

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, 2026

Puerto Rican history has been a contested space ever since its early days. From Fray Íñigo Abad y la Sierra’s 1788 book to Paul G. Miller’s Historia de Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century, the production of history has served different political purposes. Meléndez-Badillo's lecture explored the ways that history teaching and writing gave way to racialized tropes of Puerto Rican docility and laziness. More recently, however, the state has moved to silence or erase the past through Puerto Rico’s “politics of forgetting.” The talk ended with the ways that these ideas are being challenged by artists and cultural producers. 

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Claire Jiménez, 2024

How does one “craft” voice? Drawing upon the Barbadian scholar and poet Kamau Brathwaite’s assertion that the “noise” is part of the meaning, Claire Jiménez, author of What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, explored the pedagogical implications of teaching “voice” in the creative writing workshop. Jiménez reflects on her work on the Puerto Rican Literature Project and the creation of her own novel, as she discusses how the writer can incorporate considerations of history, especially those histories of colonialism and displacement, to imagine the voices of their characters.

Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023), which was awarded the 2024 Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction. She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. 

Past Series Guests 2006-2024