The Latina/o Studies Program extends congratulations to affiliates Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Elena Foulis, Glenn Martinez, and Paloma Martinez Cruz, along with director Inés Valdez for their recent support and recognition from the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme!

Elena Foulis, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Glenn Martinez, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Director of the Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures, with collaboration from Elizabeth Fitzgerald, Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing, received a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme grant of $18,000 for the project “Documenting of Latina/os/x in Ohio stories during COVID-19 through performed storytelling.” The project seeks to collect oral histories of Latinas/os/x during COVID-19 in Ohio and to make them available to the public on a digital platform. In addition, stories will be performed live (or virtually), in order to model best practices for transformational community engagement through storytelling.

Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Associate Professor Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies, and Inés Valdez, Associate Professor of Political Science and LS director, were named members of the inaugural cohort of the GAHDT Society of Fellows. The program's goals are to support faculty research and creative practices that highlight the transformative power of the arts and humanities to address global challenges and social needs; develop shared responses; and facilitate the multi-disciplinary exchange of ideas and methods on a shared topic. Fellowships are designed to provide faculty with release time to focus on their scholarly and artistic work, as well as with opportunities to engage with other Ohio State faculty, students and local Columbus community organizations. In addition to participating in a biweekly seminar, fellows co-organize a culminating year-end event to share their work.

Professor Martinez-Cruz's project "Becoming Essential: A Neoliberal Fantasy of the Migrant Worker's Body" examines how the pandemic has engendered new conversations about who is an “essential” worker and argues that a mapping of south-to-north migrations should be informed by a human rights perspective. Through "Human Rights and Cultures of Empire: Labor Rights, Migrant Rights and the Origin of Contemporary Democracy", Professor Valdez will explore the imperial genealogy of labor and immigrant rights during the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. During this period, the white working class in the U.S. and English settler colonies — both foreign and native — adopted imperial discourses of racial hierarchy to exclude migrants of color from jobs and land, shaping the meaning of popular sovereignty.

**https://globalartsandhumanities.osu.edu**