2022-23 CLR Faculty Fellows

The CLR Faculty Fellowship is an annual competition open to all full-time, tenure track faculty in any discipline, and is supported by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The fellowship competition opens every year in winter quarter. The fellowship grants recipients a one-quarter teaching release (2 classes) for research and writing. In addition, the CLR provides up to 100 hours of student research assistant support. Within one academic year following the fellowship period, recipients are asked to submit a final outcome or publication, and to do a short public presentation of their work.

For more information, please visit go.depaul.edu/clr

We would like to congratulate our new CLR Faculty Fellows. ¡Felicitaciones!

HEATHER MONTES-IRELAND

Assistant Professor | Dept. of Women ’ s and Gender Studies

“Decoupling Work and Dignity in Latina Visual Culture”

My research examines an archive of films centering the lives and struggles of Latina mothers, who are often denied human dignity as a coercible, exploitable and cheap labor pool, to interrogate the instrumentalization of the gendered and racialized Latina body as a laboring body above all else. This work seeks to illuminate the radically different conceptualizations of dignity explored within Latina cultural production which reaches far beyond U.S. work society ’s conscriptions. In a comparative analysis of this archive of films and broader U.S. immigration and anti-poverty policy, my works reveals how Latina mothers navigate a complex set of structural barriers as they seek their own imagined forms of dignity—specifically more just, inhabitable worlds for themselves, their children, and their communities.

ANA SCHAPOSCHNIK

Associate Professor | Dept. of History

“Did the Holy Office Leave Room for Agency?: The Trial of Faith of Francisco Vázquez (Lima, 1600s)”

I plan to focus on the example of Francisco Vázquez. He was as a merchant of Portuguese descent imprisoned in Lima in 1637. The Holy Office of the Inquisition accused him of being a Crypto-Jewish heretic, a bigamist, and of hiding his true linage and his real profession. At the end of his trial of faith Vázquez was given a second chance to reinsert himself into the community. Interestingly, after the 1639 sentence, Francisco Vázquez appealed the trial as a whole, basing his appeal on issues of lineage instead of on religious practices. His argument for the appeal was that he was an Old Christian, and as such he was not connected to a network of Crypto-Jewish heretics; for that reason, his appeal says, Francisco Vázquez did not deserve to go through a trial of faith.

MONICA REYES

Assistant Professor | Dept. of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse

"Shelter Rhetorics: Storytelling within the U.S. Asylum Process”

I propose to expand a study I conducted within an emergency homeless shelter, where I investigated how people who are seeking asylum and those who work with them navigate the rhetorical pressures of having to write compelling asylum narratives required for legal permission to remain in the country. Through the shelter community ’s own interviews, drawings, and photos, my book will demonstrate how liminal sites, like this shelter, provide opportunities for displaced communities to employ what I term shelter rhetorics, distinct shared rhetorical practices of daily life—like silence and routine—that both safeguard vulnerabilities and enact agency for individuals within precarious spaces. By practicing shelter rhetorics, the shelter encourages clients to tell their unique stories in ways that help them move while simultaneously critiquing reductive dominant discourses about what it means to be an “asylum seeker” .