Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies 2025 CLALS Graduate Student Summer Research Grants
The 2025 CLALS Graduate Student Summer Research Grants are intended to provide outstanding graduate students in the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and at the University of Pennsylvania with the opportunity to deepen their disciplinary interests in Latin America and Latinx Studies.
The application is open to Penn graduate students without citizenship or visa requirements.
Grantees will have to present their findings at a special event of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies Internal Speaker (CLALSIS) Series during the 2024-2025 academic year.
We generally distribute five to ten awards in the range of $500 to $1,000, depending on applications and funding at the time of award distribution.
Applications will be due in March 2025. Please contact the CLALS program with any questions at clals-upenn@sas.upenn.edu, or you may contact the CLALS Associate Director directly at bartch@sas.upenn.edu.
----------------
| CLALS Graduate Student Summer Research Grants 2024 | Department/School | Title | Faculty Advisor |
|
Hugo Salas |
Spanish and Portuguese |
Modern Traditionalism: Refurbishing gauchos, llaneros, and charros |
Ericka Beckman |
|
Wilson Hernandez |
Criminology |
“Playing Safe” against gender-based violence: An impact evaluation of a soccer-based program for boys and girls |
Aaron Chalfin |
|
Yenny Paola Rueda Guevara |
Demography |
The impact of early-life nutrition on socioeconomic status, physical health and cognitive function through middle age |
Jere Behmran |
|
Clara Ines Seceira Ziegler |
Anthropology |
From Clear to Thick Waters: Understanding Lake’s Atitlán Socioecological Changes in Guatemala |
Kristina Lyons |
|
Gwendalynn Roebke |
Philosophy |
Who Can we Be, Who Can we Become, After all this Blood : An Embodied Philosophical Pursuit of the Potentiality of the Marginalized’s Capacity for Coherence, for Survival, in the Wake of Colonial Rupture |
Daniele Lorenzini |
|
Gustavo Alejandro Valenzuela Merino |
Anthropology |
The Making of a Flammable City: Political Ecology of Fire Management in Valparaíso, Chile |
Kristina Lyons |
|
Joaquín Ladeuix |
History |
Against the Flow. The Chocón Dam and the Making of Industrial Buenos Aires |
Amy Offner |
|
Ana Paula Nadalini Mendes |
History |
Freedom and Tutelage: Liberated African women in Rio de Janeiro |
Roquinaldo Ferreira |
|
Elizabeth Rose |
Compatative Literature and Literary Theory |
Liquid Time / Translational Space: Black Trans* Feminist Thought in the Americas |
Zita Nunes |
| Alessandra Laurer Rosen | Anthropology | The Promise of Labor: Gender, Expertise, and Domestic Worker Reform in Mexico | Kristina Lyons |
| Astrid López Méndez | Spanish and Portuguese | Readings on dispossession and colonialism: the case of Servando and de las Casas |
Ericka Beckman |
| CLALS Graduate Student Summer Research Grants 2023 | Department/School | Title | Faculty Advisor |
| Pablo Aguilera de Castillo | Anthropology/SAS | Excavating Subterranean Memories: Printmaking as an Archival Method among Yucatec Maya Communities in Cocoyol, Mexico | Kristina Lyons |
| Javier Ardila | History/SAS | An Arduous Peregrination Through the Shelves: Books, Catalogs, and Public Libraries, Latin America, 1791-1893 | Ann Farnsworth-Alvear |
| Kristen Beamer | Economics/SAS | Relating Teacher Quality to Teacher and School Characteristics in Mexico | Petra Todd |
| Elver Miguel Durango Loaiza | History/SAS | La Llave de la Tierra Firme: Trade and Imperial Crisis in the Guajira Peninsula, New Granada (1748-1808) | Marcy Norton |
| Jeanne Rachel Lieberman | Anthropology/SAS | Community Media, Historical Memory, and the Making of Justice in Colombia | Kristina Lyons |
| Bonnie Maldonado | Africana Studies/SAS | Decadent Republic: Black Dominican Women Making Food and Embodying Freedom, Post 20th Century | Grace Sanders Johnson |
| Gabriela Irem Noles Cotito | Africana Studies/SAS | “The True Emancipation:” Agrarian Reform Act and the Formation of Black Citizenship in Peru 1969-1975 | Michael Hanchard |
| Stephanie Rivera-Kumar | City and Regional Planning/Weitzman | Mexican Immigrants Strengthening Philadelphia: A Transnational Mixed Methods Approach |
Domenic Vitiello |
|
Elizabeth Rose |
Compatative Literature and Literary Theory |
Liquid Time / Translational Space: Black Trans* Feminist Thought in the Americas |
Zita Nunes |
| Clara Ines Secaira Zeigler | Anthropology/SAS | Understanding cyanobacterial blooms: past and present perspectives from various actors from Lake Atitlán’s watershed in Guatemala | Kristina Lyons |
|
|
| CLALS Graduate Student Summer Research Grants 2022 | Department/School | Title | Faculty Advisor |
| Carlos Alberto Aguilar Gonzalez | Sociology/SAS | "Aislados;" Undocumented migration in Puerto Rico | Roberto Gonzales |
| Juan Arboleda | History/SAS | Raise Your Hand: Constitutional Fever and Participatory Democracy in Brazil and Colombia at the End of the Cold War | Ann Farnsworth-Alvear |
| Joao Victor Nery Fiocchi Rodrigues | Sociology/SAS | Race, Citizenship, and State Formation in the Americas: A Comparative Historical Project | Tukufu Zuberi |
| Joshua Reason | Africana Studies/SAS | (Re)mixing Desire: Black Queer & Trans Experiments in Worldmaking | Keisha-Khan Perry |
| Alexandra Sanchez Rolon | Africana Studies/SAS | Puerto Ricans Organizing for Sovereignty in the 19th Century | |
| Marta Silvia Sanchís Ferrer | Romance Languages/SAS | Healing Narratives For Our Present World: Sharing Communal Wisdom | Ashley Brock |
| Cecelia Gonzalez Godino | Romance Languages/SAS | The Other Side of History: Geological Poetics and Epistemological Convergences in Caribbean Art | Odette Casamayor-Cisneros |
| Ericka Graciela Staufert-Reyes | Graduate School of Education | Fostering racial literacies and decolonial praxis across borders: An inquiry community of Mexican educators | Hans Gerald Campano |
| LALS Graduate Student On-site Research Grant 2021 | |||
| Name | Department/School(s)(Most departments are in SAS) | Project Title | Faculty Advisor |
| Eiver Miguel Durango Loaiza | History | La llave de la Tierra Firme,” Trade and Imperial Transforamation in a Black and Indigenous Caribbean (1748-1808) | Marcy Norton and Roquinaldo Ferreira |
| Taylor Elizabeth Dysart | History and Sociology of Science | The Scientist and the Jaguar: Ayahuasca, Enchantment an the Politics of Knowledge in the Amazon, 1849-2000 | Sebastián Gil-Riaño |
| Carmen Torre Perez | Romance Languages | “Friki” History: Building a Digital Archive of Cuba’s Underground Cultures (1980-1999) | Odette Casamayor-Cisneros |
| Gillian Maris Jones | Anthropology | Afro-Indigenous Hurricane Survival: Imperial Connections and Beyond | Deborah A. Thomas |
| Gillian Maris Jones | Department of Anthropology | No End to Aftermath: Blackness and Being in the Wake of Slavery, Imperialism, and Atlantic Hurricanes | Deborah Thomas |
| Lenin Lozano Guzman | Romance Languages | Rethinking Rural Peru and Colombia: The Realist Novel during the Neoliberal Era | Ericka Beckman |
| Michael Martin Shea | Comparative Literature and Literary Theory | Neoliberal Visions: Crisis Landscapes and Poetic Sights | Dr. Ashley Brock |
| Daniel Morales-Armstrong | Africana Studies and History | ¿Un Tema Agotado?: Reading and Writing Post-Emancipation Labor Contracting in Puerto Rico | Grace Sanders Johnson |
| Randall C Burson | History | Disastrous Legacies: Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, and Florida in the Hurricane’s Eye in 1928 and Beyond | Adriana Petryna |
| LALS Graduate Student On-site Research Grant 2020 | |||
| Name | Department/School(s)(Most departments are in SAS) | Project Title | Faculty Advisor |
| Randall Burson | Anthropology & Perelman School of Medicine | Movements for a Dignified Life: Situating Mapuche Rights to Life and Land in Chile’s Shifting Political Landscape | Adriana Petryna |
| Kim Cardenas | Political Science | LGBTQ+ Latinx and Black Activism: Identity Salience, Local Context, and Mobilization | Michael Jones-Correa |
| Santiago Cunial | Political Science | Energy Transitions in Developing Countries: Economic Crises and Time Horizons in Latin America | Tulia Falleti |
| Francisco Diaz | Anthropology | Becoming Mayanist: the archaeo-genesis of a research tradition | Richard Leventhal |
| Dylan Farrell-Bryan | Sociology | Deciding to Deport: Judges, Decision-Making, and the Bureaucracy of Removal from Immigration Court | Emilio Parrado |
| Gillian Maris Jones | Anthropology and Africana Studies | No End to Aftermath: Blackness and Being in the Wake of Slavery, Imperialism, and Atlantic Hurricanes | Deborah Thomas |
| Yasmín Amira Mertehikian | Sociology | Argentina’s Fertility Regime (1980-2010): The End of the First Demographic Transition or an Emergent Second One? | Emilio Parrado |
| Daniel Morales-Armstrong | Africana Studies | Developing a Transnational, Multi-Archive Catalog of Documents Related to Post-Emancipation Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico | Grace Sanders Johnson |
| Brett Robert | History | Disastrous Legacies: Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, and Florida in the Hurricane’s Eye in 1928 and Beyond | Ann Farnsworth Alvear |
| Giovani Rocha | Political Science and Africana Studies | Racial Policy, Ideology and Subnational Politics in Latin America | Tulia Falleti |
| Marlen Rosas | History | Recording Resistance: Indigenous Activists' Archives and Narrative Power in Ecuador | Ann Farnsworth-Alvear |
| Michael MartinShea | Comparative Literature and Literary Theory | Seeing Beyond History: American Visionary Poets and the Neoliberal Turn | Ashley Brock |