9 WAYS THE GRADUATE CENTER AND ITS SCHOLARS ARE INFLUENCING HISPANIC HERITAGE

During Hispanic Heritage Month, we are celebrating the scholarship and advocacy of our students, faculty, and alumni. From awards and grants to hard-hitting research, these Graduate Center scholars are making a difference. 

Alumni Rojo Robles Mejias and Rebecca L. Salois, faculty members at Baruch College, started a new podcast called Latinx Visions, which explores many forms of Latinx art and culture. 

CUNY has been named to a prestigious new national consortium that aims to improve academic opportunities for Latinx scholars in the humanities, backed by a $5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Graduate Center is coordinating CUNY’s participation. 

Ph.D. student Elena Romero (Urban Education), who is also a correspondent and producer of Latinas on CUNY TV and a full-time professor at FIT, wants to draw attention to "the need to recruit more Latinx students into Ph.D. programs and also the need for colleges and universities to recruit, hire, tenure, and support Latinx professors."

Master’s student Atilio Barreda (Data Analysis and Visualization) is interested in increasing the number of Latinx people in science and technology academic positions and joined a program that pairs Latinx people going to STEM graduate school with mentors.

Alumnus Noel Torres-Rivera (Ph.D. ’21, Music), who wrote his dissertation on Puerto Rican avant-garde composer Rafael Aponte-Ledée, was hired as an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Missouri Kansas City Conservatory and shares his tips for landing a tenure-track position. 

Alumnus José R. Chávarry (Ph.D. ’19, Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures), who is now an assistant professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of Charleston, also shares this advice for getting on the tenure-track.

Alumna Christine Folch (Ph.D. ’12, Anthropology) was named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, receiving $200,000 for a two-year study of sustainable development in Paraguay.

Alumna Sandra Castro (Ph.D. ’21, Social Welfare) is now the assistant dean of undergraduate programs in Adelphi University’s College of Professional Continuing Studies. At the Graduate Center, she studied immigrant mothers on Long Island who came to the U.S. from Central America without their children, parented them from afar, and then finally reunited with them. 

Alumnus Conner Martinez (M.A ’21, Political Science) is studying anti-immigration policies and their impact on U.S. politics and on Latinx political involvement in his doctoral research at Notre Dame.

Published by the Office of Communications and Marketing.