Mirelsie Velázquez, associate chair and associate professor of Latina/Latino studies, has been selected for the 2026-2027 OpEd Project Public Voices Fellowship. The fellowship is a year-long program led by the OpEd Project that helps faculty amplify their expertise in ways that contribute to public conversations about pressing issues.
Velázquez will join the 19 other faculty members in her cohort in four sessions during the 2026-27 academic year and will be paired with a journalism mentor who provides one-on-one editing and coaching. Fellows will publish two or more op-ed pieces during the program.
Velázquez is interdisciplinary scholar whose work centers the history of education, women's history, Puerto Rican studies, gender and sexuality, and teacher education. Her award-winning book, Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940-1977 (University of Illinois Press 2022), chronicles the Puerto Rican community’s response to the urban decay in which they were forced to live, work, and especially learn. She’s currently working on her second book, Genealogies of Empowerment and the Makings of Home: Latina/o Activism at the University of Illinois, 1970–1992, and an oral history project, “De Isla a Chicago: Stories of Puerto Rican Teachers, 1970-1990,” that collects oral histories of Puerto Rican educators who were recruited to work in Chicago in the 1970s to serve the needs of a diverse student population.
Last year she was named a Conrad Humanities Scholar, received a Campus Fellowship from the Humanities Research Institute, and a Campus Research Board Grant. She also contributed an essay to the exhibit catalog for Aquí en Chicago at the Chicago History Museum, wrote the preface to Shifting the Lens in History Education: Centering Racial and Ethic Knowledge in the Classroom and contributed the essay "Critical Historical Methodologies" to Critical Qualitative Research and Social Justice: Key Concepts in Qualitative Methods.