Congratulations to Lorenzo García-Amaya and Gustavo Verdesio for winning LSA Michigan Humanities Awards! This award grants faculty a term off to work on projects focusing on the humanities and qualitative social sciences.Lorenzo is the Associate Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures and an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics. His research focuses on second language acquisition: how multilinguals maintain fluency over the course of their lives and how one language impacts the other and vice versa.Gustavo is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Native American Studies. His research interests include Indigenous materialities, such as objects, agricultural practices, and monumentality, in the past and present context of Uruguayan history and settler colonialism.
He is most interested in the most important Indigenous materiality, which is Indigenous bodies. This perspective is particularly relevant today as Indigenous groups previously deemed extinct have made a resurgence and are met with hostility.With these awards, Lorenzo and Gustavo continue the scholarly excellence of the Romance Languages and Literatures department, joining twenty-one previous recipients from RLL: Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Ryan Szpiech, Nicholas Henriksen, Dan Nemser, Karla Mallette, Juli Highfill, Gareth Williams, Michele Hannoosh, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, David Caron, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Kate Jenckes, George Hoffmann, Fernando Arenas, Giorgio Bertellini, Peggy McCracken, Vincenzo Binetti, Paolo Squatriti, Jarrod Hayes, Cristina Moreiras-Menor, William Paulson, and Frieda Ekotto.
