EXCEPTIONAL RECOGNITION
As a Professor of Psychology and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek was declared a “scientific entrepreneur” from the American Association of Psychology. Writing 16 books and 250+ publications, she served as President of the International Congress for Infant Studies and is on the Governing Board of the Society for Research in Child Development. Her Einstein Never Used Flashcards won the Book for a Better Life Award in 2003 with her Becoming Brilliant (2016) reaching the NYTimes Best Sellers List in education. Hirsh-Pasek won awards from every psychological and educational society for her basic science and translational work designed to bridge basic science and educational impact. A founding member of the Latin American School for Educational and Cognitive Neuroscience, she spearheaded a global network of scientists devoted to educational science. Co-founder of the global Learning Science Exchange Fellowship, she brings together scientists, journalists, policy makers and entertainers, to put learning science in the hands of educators.
Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
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Growing up on the island of Puerto Rico, I was always aware of the presence of water. Yet, beyond its role as an intrinsic natural resource, water performs important cultural work, one that takes on multiple meanings when placed in dialogue with Afro-diasporic religions. My book, Channeling Knowledges: Afro-Diasporic Waters in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds (in-progress) asserts that water allows us to create unexpected connections between communities, nations, and disciplines. Bringing together Afro-Latinx studies, Anthropology, Art, History, and Religion, Channeling Knowledges proposes a spiritually-inflected mode of reading water in literature and art created by women, as well as civic life.
Perhaps unexpectedly, my interest in water led me to work with archives, primarily the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers (GEA Papers). Documenting multiple aspects of Anzaldúa’s life, the GEA Papers show just how far Anzaldúa’s work extends beyond her best-known text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Currently, I am researching Anzaldúa’s writings on the personal and social ramifications of illness. This line of inquiry was spurred by my archival encounter with Anzaldúa’s largely unknown short story “Puddles,” a text that I argue engages the HIV/AIDS pandemic of the 80s and 90s.
Beyond literature and archives, I am also interested in media. In 2018, I wrote an article on the Puerto Rican play-turned-film “Por amor en el caserío” and I recently contributed an essay on the innovative bilingual podcast ‘La Brega, Stories of the Puerto Rican Experience’ to the peer-reviewed online platform Latinx Talk. For more information, click here.
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FEATURED PUBLICATION
~Alan McPherson (History)
Ghosts of Sheridan Circle tells the definitive story of the assassination of Chilean exile Orlando Letelier and the multinational investigation that followed. A former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Letelier was killed in a gruesome car bombing in Washington, D.C., in 1976, three years after a coup overthrew his government. The paranoid dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that emerged eliminated its perceived enemies around the world, Letelier among them. In the car with him was his U.S. colleague, Ronni Moffitt, who also died. The double murder set off an international incident.
For almost 20 years after the assassination, the Letelier and Moffitt families pressured the U.S. and Chilean governments to bring to justice those who ordered and carried out the deed, a veritable homicide squad that included one U.S. citizen, a handful of Cuban-Americans, and top Chileans in the secret service. Ghosts of Sheridan Circle features documents declassified in 2015 and 2016 that reveal that the CIA concluded as early as the 1980s that Pinochet himself ordered the hit and then covered it up. The book is a true crime political thriller, filled with international intrigue, courtroom drama, and the courage and sorrow of surviving family members. It holds implications for the meaning of the Cold War, human rights, and counter-terrorism.
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AWARD OF THE MONTH
Joining the ranks of Robert Redford, Spike Lee, Ingmar Bergman, and others, Sonia Sanchez, an emeritus professor since her 1999 retirement as the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women’s Studies has won the 28th annual Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize - a $250,000 cash award that is one of the country’s most prestigious and generous arts honors “in recognition of her ongoing achievements in inspiring change through the power of the word." The 87-year-old Sanchez has contributed through her writing, poetry, mentorship, and activism in the civil and human rights movements. This award is one of dozens of distinguished honors that have been bestowed upon Sanchez throughout her life.
Winner of the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Medal and the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, and the American Book Award (for Homegirls and Handgrenades), Sonia Sanchez is the author of more than twenty books, including the recently published Collected Poems (2021, Beacon Press). In December 2011, she was named Poet Laureate of her adopted home city of Philadelphia. She has lectured at more than 500 colleges and universities throughout the United States, as well as traveling extensively overseas to read her poems, and has been honored as a Ford Freedom Scholar of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.
Read the full story here.
