WEST LIBERTY, W.Va., June 21, 2023 — Dr. Felipe Rojas, a professor in WLU’s College of Liberal and Creative Arts, has been awarded nationally competitive grants that will allow him to attend two prestigious summer research institutes. The two seminars are:
- The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute “Global Geographies of Knowledge: Creating, Representing, and Commodifying Ideas Across Early Modern Places, 1400-1800” (June 26-July 21, 2023)
- The Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Institute in Nahuatl/Nawat Language Study (July 24-27, 2023)
“I want to thank the Department of English and Modern Languages along with the College of Liberal and Creative Arts for their support and encouragement throughout the grant writing process,” said Associate Professor of Spanish Dr. Felipe Rojas, who has been a faculty member at WLU since 2017. Rojas also serves as a WLU Diversity Committee co-chair.
“Dr. Rojas is a skilled and dedicated teacher-scholar who will serve as an excellent representative of WLU at these institutes. I know that he will make a considerable contribution to both and look forward to seeing what new skills and knowledge he brings back to our campus and students,” said Professor of English Dr. Angela Rehbein, who chairs the Department of English and Modern Languages.
The National Endowment for the Humanities grant came as a bit of a surprise to Rojas.
“It will see me in St. Louis exchanging academic ideas with other scholars from around the country. This month-long seminar will provide me with the intellectual stimulus needed to complete my professional goal of producing my monograph on the figure of Ganymede in Spanish Early Modern theater,” he explained. (Ganymede was a Trojan prince carried off to heaven by Zeus where he was appointed as cup-bearer of the gods.)
In addition, immediately following Rojas’ residence in St. Louis, he will spend a week at the Newberry Library in Chicago learning Nahuatl, one of the most popularly-spoken pre-Columbian and indigenous languages of Mesoamerica.
“As a professor of both Spanish and Hispanic languages and cultures, it is important that I am able to give my students the full perspective of the languages that are spoken in the Spanish-speaking world. This workshop will allow me to offer students a wider learning experience and understand what it means to be Hispanic,” Rojas explained.
“I am thrilled to have been awarded two nationally competitive and distinguished grants to participate in both academically rewarding and pedagogically valuable seminars during the summer,” he concluded.
The Department of English and Modern Languages is housed in WLU’s College of Liberal and Creative Arts and offers four majors and seven minors in a variety of areas of study, including English Education, French, literature, Spanish, TESL, and writing. For more information, please click here.