2025-26 CLACS Fellows

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Competition Announcement

CLACS Faculty Fellows *
2025-26 Academic Year

* Open to all UW-Milwaukee faculty and full-time academic staff

A PDF of this call is available for download here.

Challenge and Progress in Latin America and the Caribbean

Application deadline: May 22, 2025

The UWM Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) invites applications for its Faculty Fellows program, focused annually on diverse themes. Fellows will contribute to scholarly exchanges on the selected topic and will each co-plan a public-facing activity, to be supported by CLACS as part of its National Resource Center commitment to teaching, research, and public engagement about Latin America and the Caribbean. The National Resource Center program is funded through the U.S. Department of Education to promote the deeper understanding of world regions.

This year’s CLACS Fellows theme –Challenge and Progress– invites applicants to consider how their research and/or artistic expression foregrounds areas of struggle and/or advancement (e.g. societal, disciplinary, representational) related to Latin America or the Caribbean. In a region historically shaped by positivist narratives of social, political, and economic progress, new perspectives on Latin American and Caribbean development may be in order. Our holistic understanding of challenge and progress in the region will benefit from inquiry on a variety of scales (individual, interpersonal, or group-based), perspectives, time periods, and places (imagined or natural world, urban or rural settings).

Fellows may explore the theme from any disciplinary, interpretive, creative, or analytic approach. Projects may explore how particular areas of society or knowledge have developed or suffered setbacks, and how we can best respond. Creative or artistic production may illuminate, complicate, or confront these dynamics. Some possible topics of focus include: access to resources and environmental sustainability; artistic and/or cultural production; communication and media; democratic decline; gender, race, or ethnicity in society; historical memory; linguistic change or expression; local, regional, or global economies; migration and/or diaspora; political structures and representation; public health; social movements and collectivity.

Eligibility: The CLACS Fellows program is open to all UWM faculty and full-time academic staff. Preference will be given to new applicants.

Award amount: Up to three Fellows will each receive $2,000 support, payable after July 1, 2025. Fellows will work with CLACS staff to ensure spending compliance with campus, system, and federal grant policies. Final awards are contingent upon continued availability of CLACS’s federal Title VI National Resource Center grant funds from the U.S. Department of Education.

Individual commitments: During the 2025-26 academic year, (1) participate in periodic, informal Fellows exchanges to discuss works-in-progress, and (2) plan at least one public engagement program in collaboration with CLACS staff, to support the Fellow’s ongoing research and promote broader understanding of Latin America & the Caribbean. Program possibilities include: inviting a guest speaker, giving a brownbag lecture, curating a small exhibition, hosting a film screening with discussion, organizing a virtual or in-person panel discussion, offering a K-16 teacher training.

To apply: Email the following materials as a single PDF file to CLACS Director Natasha Borges Sugiyama (sugiyamn@uwm.edu) by May 22, 2025:

  1. Two-page (maximum) CV, including name and departmental affiliation;
  2. Two-page (maximum) description of how your research will contribute to scholarly exchange on the year’s theme, broadly defined. Be sure to explain how your research connects with Latin American and Caribbean Studies and CLACS’s mission to promote teaching, research, and public engagement on Latin America and the Caribbean;
  3. 500-word (maximum) description of how a public-facing program related to your topic would enhance your own work and/or support greater understanding of the region. For more on the Center’s mission and public engagement work, please see uwm.edu/clacs.

For more information, contact CLACS Director Natasha Borges Sugiyama.