The LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Internship program provides a UT upper-division undergraduate or graduate student a paid opportunity to work closely with LLILAS Benson staff to conceive, develop, support, and launch digital scholarship efforts. Call for applications is open and closes Friday, November 3, 2023.
2023 Interns
Rosa de Jong is a first-year master’s student in the Latin American Studies and Information Studies dual program at The University of Texas at Austin. She has a B.A. in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic. Her research focuses on archiving political violence in the US-Mexico border regions. During her internship, Rosa will create a bi-lingual digital resource that brings together histories of labor mobilizations in Texas with information and resources for current-day workers.
Deniz Limon is a junior undergraduate Psychology major with a certificate in Business Spanish. She is passionate about working with Latinx communities by conducting research, exploring Latinx art and culture, and advocating for Latinx issues. In her free time, she likes to explore Austin cafes and create digital art. For her internship, Deniz will be creating digital teaching and research resources on and for the U.S. Latine LGBTQ+ community.
Mason Thompson is a sophomore at Huston-Tillotson University majoring in History Education with a minor in African American Studies. He is currently a member and secretary of the Apple Pre-Ed African American Male Teacher Initiative at Huston-Tillotson University. Mason plans on being a college professor teaching History and African American Studies. For his internship, Mason will be identifying Black Diasporic materials in the Benson Latin American Collection for research and teaching as part of the Archiving Black América Initiative.
Trent Wintermeier is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing with a Digital Studies graduate portfolio. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Florida. Trent is a Graduate Research Assistant for the AudiAnnotate Extensible Workflow (AWE) project at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include rhetorical theory, cultural rhetorics, science and technology studies, western philosophy, and the digital humanities. Trent will be making the Benson’s audio collections more accessible for teaching.
2022 Interns
Cindia Arango is a second-year doctoral student in Latin American Studies. She is a historian with a master’s degree in geography with a focus in cartography and environmentalism. Cindia researches environmental history and slavery in Colombia during the 18th century and has published and investigated topics about contemporary human geography, history and territories, and colonial slavery. For her internship, Cindia will be developing remote digital humanities workshops for students in Colombia using the Benson’s archival collections.
Marissa Galicia is a third-year International Relations and Global Studies and Latin American Studies double major. She has a certificate in Business Spanish. She is passionate about making connections between cultures and politics. Marissa is interested in researching the progress women have made in Latin America and is looking forward to teaching her research findings to students in an engaging way using digital scholarship methods and archival materials form the Benson.
Isabel Ibáñez de la Calle is currently a doctoral student in Spanish and Portuguese. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. She has written about travel literature, contemporary art, architecture, and theater for different magazines and media in Latin America. She writes fiction, nonfiction, and theater and has taught literature and writing in Mexico. Isabel is interested in researching the representations of religion, Christianity, and conservatism in contemporary literature and film in Latin America, Mexico, and Mexican-American communities through a digital lens during her internship.
Camila Ordorica is currently a doctoral student in History. She has a Bachelor in History from the Universidad Iberoamericana and a Master in Gender Studies from the Central European University in Budapest. Camila’s research interests include the history of archives and conceptual feminist history. For her internship, Camila will be designing a remote digital humanities and archival workshops for undergraduate students in Mexico and UT.
María José Pérez Sián is a Guatemalan Tz’utujil woman and a doctoral student in History. She has a B.A. degree in Anthropology from the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences and Humanities from the Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centroamérica of the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas. Her main lines of research are violence and genocide, feminisms, bodies and sexualities, and transitional justice. María José is currently researching the criminalization of sexual dissidence in the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive and will be mapping her findings for her internship project.
2021 Interns
Adriana Linares-Palma is an archaeologist and a PhD student at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, at The University of Texas at Austin. Her current focus of study is a community-based archaeological program at the Ixil region, Guatemala, as an ongoing project that is discussing with ancestral authorities the benefits and risks of conducting archaeological research in their communities. Her research interests include Community-based Archaeology, Feminist and Intersectional Archaeology, Decolonization of Archaeology, Indigenous Studies, Multivocality, Mesoamerican Archaeology and Women Figurines. Her internship project will focus on intersectional mapping of archaeological research policies in Guatemala, focusing on two periods: the creation of seven archaeological parks (1945-1954) and the present (2019-2021).
Alexandra Mendez an MA candidate in Latin American Art History and Visual Studies from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her research focuses on the photographic and video production of Cuban artist Juan Carlos Alom during the time known as the “Special Period in Times of Peace.” She has interned with the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, Landmarks UT, and the Blanton Museum of Art. She will work closely with LLILAS Benson Latin American partners to develop digital humanities projects based on their collections.
Estefania Rodriguez is a fourth-year Latin American Studies, International Relation and Global Studies, and Journalism triple major. Her research is centered on student movements and mass mobilizations, popular education, and carceral studies, specifically in a Latin American context. Estefania’s work is driven by her belief in the power of community collaboration and as a LILAS intern, she hopes to work to make accessible educational resources for the youth. During her internship, she will trace the process of desegregation in Texas schools from the 1920s to the 1970s, specifically focusing on its impacts on Mexican American students, to build a dynamic pedagogical resource.
Jennyfer Rodríguez (She/Her/Hers/Ella) is a queer Guatemalan immigrant committed to an intersectional pedagogy of liberation, and to the relocation of resources and reparations for minoritized Central American communities in academia and beyond. She is currently completing a master’s program in Latin American Studies and a master’s portfolio in Native American and Indigenous Studies. With a background in Central American and Transborder Studies as well as in Spanish Linguistics, Rodríguez’s research focuses on the cultural production of Indigenous and Black Central Americans by historicizing the various forms of literary traditions to reimagine the study of Sociolinguistics and Literature. In this sense, digital scholarship tools are pivotal to her efforts towards the analysis and incorporation of Central American Cultural Studies in higher education curricula. She will work closely with LLILAS Benson Latin American partners to develop digital humanities projects based on their collections.
Past Interns
FALL 2020
Vanessa Garcia Hutchins is a second-year graduate student at the School of Information, specializing in archives and digital humanities. In her goal to make cultural heritage accessible through archival science, she brings together her background in art history and education. Vanessa holds a Master of Arts in Art History from UT Austin and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Visual Arts Education from CUNY Brooklyn College. She has over six years of experience in the nonprofit and education field, including three years as an elementary school art teacher. Her recent experiences in the information profession include her role as a Teaching Assistant at the iSchool, a volunteer at the Austin History Center, and a participant in “The Art Historical Image in the Digital Age” 2019 summer institute at the American Academy in Rome. During her internship, Vanessa curated a digital collection of primary sources related to Antonio López de Santa Anna — a 19th century Mexican politician with a legacy of losing over half the nation’s territory to the US. She created a narrative exhibit highlighting items from the collection, and an interactive map in which viewers can browse the collection in a temporal-geospatial context.
Spring 2020
Elizabeth Peattie is a second-year Master of Science in Information Studies student, specializing in Archives and Libraries at the School of Information and the Benson Digital Initiatives GRA. She has volunteered with Austin Public Library and TSLAC, and interned last summer at the SFMOMA Research Library. Her previous professional experience involved teaching and administrative work for ESL education both domestic and abroad. She attended U.C. Berkeley as an undergraduate, majoring in Art History and Cultural Anthropology.
Spring 2019
Mounika Puligurthi is an undergraduate senior double-majoring in Computer Science and Spanish. As a self starter, she taught herself how to program in tenth grade and now has her own travel blog website that she coded from scratch. As a former Girl Scout, she is passionate about caring for others and giving back to her community. She currently teaches computer skills in Spanish (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Suite tools) to low-income Hispanic adults at Manos De Cristo, a nonprofit based in Austin. She is looking to connect her tech and foreign language interests to serve those in need so that they can not only follow their dreams, but also live them.
- Ulises Dominguez López, Master Student, Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía Manuel del Castillo Negrete (Mexico), (Summer 2019)
- Olivia Schroeder Pacheco, Master Student, Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía Manuel del Castillo Negrete (Mexico), (Summer 2018)
- Josefrayn Sanchez-Perry, Doctoral Student, Spanish & Portuguese Department (Spring 2018)
- Madeleine Olson, Doctoral Student, History Department (Summer 2017)