Research and Activities
Our graduate students receive substantial support for their research from the department and via internal grants or fellowships from the Humanities Institute, the Rock Ethics Institute, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, the Africana Research Center, and the Richards Civil War Era Center, among other programs and initiatives on campus. These sources provide funds to travel to relevant libraries and archives, as well as release time to concentrate on their dissertation writing. Students also are afforded professional development opportunities to design and sometimes teach upper-level literature and culture classes related to their research; to work closely with faculty members as research assistants; and to participate in research collaborations supported by the Humanities Institute’s Collaborative Colloquia or the Weiss Chair Research Collaboratives.
The Department and the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School enthusiastically support graduate students traveling to present their research at national and international conferences. Our students also receive competitive scholarships to support their dissertation work and other research activities through programs such as the College’s RGSO Dissertation Support Award and the Superior Teaching and Research (STAR) Award.
With this support, our students have pursued original research and written outstanding dissertations in literary and cultural studies. Their projects have engaged with interdisciplinary frameworks from visual studies, feminist and queer theory, performance studies, sound studies, and critical race and ethnic studies (among other fields) to offer new insights into Latin American, Latinx, and Iberian literary and artistic works. A complete list of dissertations developed by our graduate alumni is available here.
Research Facilities
The University Libraries comprise a central collection and seven branch libraries at the University Park campus as well as libraries at other Penn State commonwealth campuses. At University Park, Pattee and Paterno Library houses the Arts and Humanities Library, with extensive holdings in Latin American and Iberian literature and culture; the Media Commons; the Knowledge Commons; and the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, which features relevant holdings to our fields such as the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance Party (Peru) Collection, the Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora, the José Guadalupe Posada Prints, and the Luis Alberto Sánchez Papers. The University Libraries have Interlibrary Loan Services that allow faculty and students to borrow materials from other libraries, with established partnerships with research libraries in Pennsylvania and neighboring states (PALCI) and across the BTAA (Big Ten Academic Alliance).
The resources and collections of the Palmer Museum of Art and the Matson Museum of Anthropology—which include photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Ana Mendieta, pottery from the Andes, and other works by artists from across the Americas—are also available to graduate students.