2025-02-26
- We’re pleased to announce that LLS alumna Celina Villanueva (BA, ’08, Latina/Latino studies) has been awarded the LAS Outstanding Young Alumni Award. The award recognizes alumni who have demonstrated the values derived from a liberal arts and sciences education by outstanding achievement or who have...
2025-01-29 - Education professor Rochelle Gutiérrez has been named to the National Academy of Education. A professor of curriculum and instruction and of mathematics education, Gutiérrez challenges deficit views of racial minority students and believes that teachers must have more than pedagogical or content knowledge to be successful. An Illinois faculty member since 1996, Gutiérrez also holds appointments...
2024-12-11 - As an oral historian, Illinois history professor, Yuridia “Yuri” Ramírez records the stories of people who have never been written about in history books. “These people have, in some ways, made the most impactful legacies in their communities, and people don’t know...
2024-12-04 - LLS and anthropology alumna Teresa Ramos (BA, ’04; MA, ’08; PhD, ’12; anthropology with a minor in Latina/Latino studies) has been named the first secretary of the Illinois Department of Early Childhood (IDEC). Ramos is currently the first assistant deputy governor for education in Governor JB Pritzker’s office. Pending state Senate approval, Ramos will begin her new role in January and the...
2024-12-04 - Taking the risk of applying for an internship can be frightening for any student. When Adriana Matsumoto, now a senior studying political science and Latina/Latino studies, applied for her internship with U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, she was not only following a goal to work on important legislative issues like immigration, but she was the first...
2024-11-20 - The fall 2024 LLS newsletter is here! Learn about the revival of the graduate student conference, research highlights, student internship updates, and more!
2024-11-13 - For most academics, sabbatical is a crucial time to focus on your research and a break from teaching duties. For administrators it’s especially essential, because their duties often leave little time to devote to their scholarship. For Isabel Molina-Guzmán, associate dean for student academic affairs for the College of LAS and professor of Latina/Latino studies and communication, it was a...
2024-11-13 - Powerful hurricanes, the COVID-19 pandemic, spiraling public debt and political corruption triggered humanitarian, economic and environmental crises in Puerto Rico. However, a new book suggests that the Puerto Rican and U.S. governments made these multilayered crises catastrophic through the socioeconomic, legal and racialized structures and conditions they created....- 2024-10-30 - As a unit committed to social justice and deeply invested in a rich tradition of social critique, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois condemns the offensive comments about Latinos, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans, as well as the misogyny, exhibited at a recent campaign event for Donald Trump. From reproducing tropes of Latina hyper-sexuality rife with anti-...
2024-10-02 - What can literature tell us about how people experience the law and how is the law like literature? Professor José A. de la Garza Valenzuela has been writing a book, "Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions," that centers these questions to understand what books tell us about the world we legally occupy, and how legal texts, and their interpreters, use storytelling to...
2024-09-18 - The Department of Latina/Latino Studies is proud to announce that professor Gilberto Rosas’s book Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border has received an honorable mention for the 2024 American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize. The prize recognizes work that is...
2024-09-18 - The Department of Latina/Latino Studies is proud to announce that affiliate professor Mónica García Blizzard’s book, The White Indians of Mexican Cinema: Racial Masquerade throughout the Golden Age, has received an Honorable Mention from the 2024 International Latino Book Awards. Professor García...
2024-08-28 - The Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning has released the list of teachers who were ranked as excellent by their students during the spring 2024 semester and many Latina/Latino studies faculty, affiliates, and graduate minors were included on the list. These lists are compiled each semester based on student ratings of instruction obtained from the Instructor and Course Evaluation System...- 2024-08-12 - During the Spring 2024 semester, the LLS Class of 2024 presented their senior papers and theses at the annual LLS Major Symposium. This event brought together LLS students, faculty, and family to celebrate the wonderful research our students produced. We also celebrated our 2024 graduates and award winners.Senior Research Papers & Theses Jessica "Jesse" Carmona...
2024-08-07 - On Aug. 3, 2019, a shooter killed 23 people and injured two dozen more in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart. The gunman, who posted an anti-immigration manifesto online before the shooting, targeted Latinos. He was convicted of federal hate crimes. Gilberto Rosas, who grew up in El Paso, is the department chair and a professor of...