Holy Cross Spanish Professor Receives Fellowship From National Humanities Center

Juan Ramos, associate professor of Spanish at Holy Cross, has been awarded the M.H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center for the 2021-22 academic year.

Ramos is one of 36 fellows—chosen from a pool of 638 applicants from a variety of disciplines and parts of the world—who will have the opportunity to work on an individual research project and share ideas in seminars, lectures and conferences. He is the first scholar from Holy Cross to be honored.

"Becoming a fellow at the National Humanities Center is an honor and a humbling opportunity to work in an environment that is conducive to conversations across the humanities," said Ramos. "Receiving the M.H. Abrams Fellowship, named after one of the founders of the Center, is also a motivation to make my research resonate with others beyond my primary field in Latin American literary and cultural studies."

Ramos will spend the year working on a book-length project tentatively entitled "Andean Modernismos: Affective Forms in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru," which studies poetry, fiction, literary criticism, translation, and literary journalism as literary forms that were at once innovative in transforming literary conventions, while producing emotional and affective responses among audiences in their national and international contexts. This book project engages with key scholarship in New Modernist studies, Andean studies and affect studies.

Founded in 1978, the National Humanities Center is the world's only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in the humanities. Located in Research Triangle, North Carolina, it hosts resident fellows each year, providing scholars with the resources for generating new knowledge.

Robert D. Newman, president and director of the National Humanities Center, said, "We are proud to support the work of these exceptional scholars. They were selected from an extremely competitive group of applicants, and their work covers a wide gamut of fascinating topics that promises to shape thinking in their fields for years to come. I look forward to welcoming them to the Center in the fall."

As a trained comparatist, Professor Ramos has devoted his previous research to exploring the intersections of politics and aesthetics at various moments across the twentieth century with an eye toward Latin America. This research culminated in his first monograph "Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts" (University of Florida Press, 2018) and a co-edited volume "Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures" (Palgrave, 2016). His current research focuses primarily on the Andes while making broader connections across Latin America.

A Holy Cross faculty member since 2011, Ramos was awarded the Mary Louise Marfuggi Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship in 2019,  the Arthur J. O'Leary Faculty Recognition Award from 2019 to 2022 and a Holy Cross Faculty Fellowship for the fall 2021 to support his research project.

The full list of fellows is available here.