Dresher Center Summer 2024 Fellows

Thu, 09 May 2024 11:51:10 -0400
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Congratulations to these faculty for being awarded a Dresher Center Fellowship for Summer 2024.

María Célleri, Assistant Professor, Gender, Women’s + Sexuality Studies; Tania Lizarazo, Associate Professor, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; Thania Muñoz D., Associate Professor, Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; and Yolanda Valencia, Assistant Professor, Geography and Environmental Systems
Summer 2024 Residential Faculty Fellows

Project: "Abya Yala"

The Abya Yala Project is a multi-layered series of events and collaborative work that willlead to opening the Abya Yala Research Lab—a space to support research on Latin AmericanStudies at UMBC. Abya Yala is one of the Indigenous names for the Americas. As decolonial Latin Americanists, these faculty are committed to community-building scholarship that does not center one single language, nationality, or field of study. The summer fellowship will focus on preliminary work for a multimodal open-access edited volume, including contributions from students, faculty, artists, and other community members. Following a community event in May 2024 to meet Latina/es in the DMV region interested in contributing to this collaborative publication, the Abya Yala Project will create, send out, and begin submission reviews for a Call for Abstracts during the Summer of 2024.

Sally Shivnan, Principal Lecturer, English
Summer 2024 Adjunct Faculty Fellow

Project: "Researching Settings to Inform Two Novels in a Series"

A convention of mystery novels is evocative setting, for good reason. Compelling settings can flavor the story, drench it in mood, and make the plot, through vivid details, vibrant and convincing. Shivnan’s upcoming novel, Two Can Play, is the first in a literary mystery series of literary mystery novels. Work has begin on a second novel, a prequel titled The Prodigal Daughter, as well as the third book in the series. During her summer fellowship, Shivnan will travel to conduct research on two settings that will appear in the second and third novels: Florida’s Gulf Coast and the Brittany region of France. Character and plot are the children of invention, but details of place require eyes and ears on the ground—for writing fiction, there is no substitute for this kind of research.

To learn more about these fellows and their projects, please visit our website: dreshercenter.umbc.edu.

Please join us in congratulating these fellows.