ECC professor awarded Mellon/ACLS faculty research fellowship

Antonio Ramirez, assistant professor of history and political science at Elgin Community College, was awarded a 2019 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellowship.

This is the first year of this program, which supports research projects from humanities and social science faculty who teach at two-year colleges.

The fellowships will support 26 scholars as they conduct research on a wide range of topics, and bring their findings back to their classrooms and communities.

Ramirez's research project, "Chicagolandia: Oral Histories of Chicago's Latinx Suburbs," will use oral histories of Latina/os living in the Chicago suburbs from 1960 to the present to complicate popular and scholarly understandings of late-20th-century suburbanization and immigration.

The project engages questions of race, citizenship, and equality at the nexus of two fields of scholarship-suburban history and Latinx studies-to examine how Latina/os navigated and helped shape the suburbs, a critical site of economic opportunity and political power in the postwar United States.

"We're thrilled to announce the recipients of these awards," said ACLS program officer Rachel Bernard, "each of whom exemplifies the kind of rich humanistic research, innovative pedagogy, and deep community engagement that is flourishing within humanities programs at two-year colleges across the country. This program serves an unmet need by supporting teacher-scholars at community colleges through flexible stipends that fellows can use to fund their research, teaching, and public programming."

Fellows receive a $40,000 stipend over 18 months and will participate in a session to meet, share their work, and discuss broader issues in the humanities in the community college sector.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.