Alexandro Jara, a PhD student under the advisement of Professor Andrew Sandoval-Strauz, has been selected as a 2017 recipient of a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship in the Humanities from the Bilinski Educational Foundation.

The 2017 cohort of Bilinski Fellowship recipients includes Fellows from the Departments of English, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Spanish & Portuguese in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of New Mexico. The seven Bilinski dissertation projects focus on the construction of subjectivity in Afro-Carribean autobiographies; the representation of material culture and object relations in early Medieval Anglo-Saxon literature; a comprehensive study of clause types employed in the Wayuunaiki language spoken in Columbia and Venezuela; a multi-disciplinary study of the cult of Swithun, the 9^th century bishop and later patron saint of Winchester Cathedral; the impact of multimodal composition and emergent rhetorical practices in new media on Latino and Latina students in first/second year college composition courses; and problems immanent to conventional treatments of mental illness as analyzed via contemporary philosophical and psychological research, existential phenomenology, and poststructuralist feminist theory. Jara's dissertation "Latinos and U.S. Transnational Urbanism: Mexicans, Culture, and Politics in Making San José, CA, 1950-2000" will explore the influence of Latino populations on the urban environment of one of California's largest and fastest-growing cities.

Congratulations, Alex!