The LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Curriculum Design/Redesign Staff Support Grant provides UT faculty & graduate student instructors dedicated staff support by LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship staff and a grant of up to $250 to cover expenses incurred in the design/redesign of a Latin American, U.S. Latinx, and/or African Diaspora Studies course as a digital scholarship course.
This grant program is no longer active.
2021-2022
Craig Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department. He is fascinated with the way that making things, curating exhibitions, and organizing workshops can function as devices for thinking. He is committed to experimenting with and theorizing modes of description and evocation. Current projects include the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in Central Siberia, the weird time of a shadow, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs. The LLILAS Benson DS Office will partner with Dr. Campbell to design a co-taught undergraduate course, “Mapping Indigenous Austin,” planned for Fall 2021.
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart is Assistant Professor Anthropology here at UT Austin. She holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University, an MA in Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center and an MLS in Archives Management and Rare Books from the Pratt Institute. Her research and teaching is broadly concerned with Indigenous foodways, Pacific Island studies, settler colonialism, urban infrastructure, and the performance of taste. Her book on the social history of comestible ice in Hawaiʻi, forthcoming from Duke University Press, investigates the sensorial and affective dimensions of Native dispossession. In particular, she is interested in how personal and political investments in coldness facilitate ideas about race, belonging, comfort, and leisure in the Pacific. The LLILAS Benson DS Office will partner with Dr. Hobart to design a co-taught undergraduate course, “Mapping Indigenous Austin,” planned for Fall 2021.
Circe Sturm has spent her career trying to better understand how race shapes the lived experiences of Native American and African American communities. She has taught about these topics for nearly 25 years, first at the University of Oklahoma and now at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is Professor of Anthropology and faculty in the Native American and Indigenous Studies program. She is the author of two award winning books, Blood Politics (2002) and Becoming Indian (2011), and editor of Blackness and Indigeneity in the Light of Settler Colonial Theory (2020). The LLILAS Benson DS Office will partner with Dr. Sturm to design an undergraduate course, “Oral Histories of Indigenous Texas,” planned for Fall 2021.
Monica Muñoz Martinez is an Associate Professor in the History Department. She is an award winning author, teacher, and public historian. She received her PhD in American Studies from Yale University and her AB from Brown University. She offers courses in Latinx and borderlands history, women and gender studies, histories of racial violence, public humanities, digital humanities, and restorative justice. The LLILAS Benson DS Office will partner with Dr. Martinez to design an undergraduate course, “Mapping Racial Violence in Texas,” planned for Fall 2021.
César A Salgado is an Associate Professor in the Spanish & Portuguese Department. He specializes in situating Cuban, Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Caribbean literary and cultural politics in Global South colonial and postcolonial currents and contexts. He has been recognized for his scholarly work on Cuban poet José Lezama Lima and the Orígenes circle of writers. He helped expand Cuba-U.S. academic exchange at UT Austin by launching the Cuba in Question Maymester program in 2015 and by helping secure the acquisition of Orígenes poet Eliseo Diego’s archives for the Benson Collection in 2019. The LLILAS Benson DS Office will partner with Dr. Salgado to design a graduate course, “Scanning the Caribbean: Print and Digital Networks After Orígenes,” planned for Fall 2021.
2019-2020
Astrid Runggaldier is the Assistant Director for the Mesoamerica Center and Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Art History Department. She oversees programming of educational, scholarly, and public activities for the Mesoamerica Center at UT Austin and Casa Herrera in Antigua, Guatemala. Dr. Runggaldier is a Mesoamericanist interested in particular in Maya culture and in anthropological approaches to architecture, households, and built environments in the context of the ancient civilizations of the Americas. The LLILAS Benson DS Office will partner with Dr. Runggaldier to redesign her undergraduate course, “Art and Archaeology of Ancient Peru,” planned for Spring 2020.
Alexandrea “Lexi” Perez Allison is a PhD candidate in the Department of English as well as a graduate portfolio student in the Department of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies. Her work focuses on contemporary U.S. Latina literature and its relationship with materiality, objects, and ephemera. She plans to take the “Digital Humanities + Latinx Studies: Doing Work that Matters” HILT course to learn how to incorporate digital pedagogy into her planned Fall 2019 Mexican-American & Latino Studies course “La Chicana.”