New Faculty Member Awarded NEH Grant

A project by Ana Ugarte, Ph.D., assistant professor of world languages and cultures, was among the just 233 humanities projects from across the country to be awarded National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Her proposal is among just 16 projects in Pennsylvania to receive funding.

Dr, Ugarte received a NEH Humanities Connections Planning Grant of $34,958 for her project to “support for academic programs that integrate multiple disciplines.”

Dr. Ugarte joined the faculty at Scranton in the fall of 2018. She previously taught at Duke University, where she completed her doctorate in romance studies and Spanish. Her dissertation entitled “Island Laboratories: Literary Monsters, Diseases, and Pharmacopeias in the Hispanic Caribbean,” focused on how contemporary fiction intervenes in discourses on illness and medicine in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Her scholarship centers on twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin American literature with a primary focus on Hispanic Caribbean fiction, Indigenous cultures and languages from Mexico, and medical humanities. Her research interests include bio-political theory, disability studies, postcolonial studies and indigenous languages.

Dr. Ugarte earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish philology and a master’s in Spanish American literature from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, as well as a bachelor’s in French from Universite Stendhal Grenoble III.