Young Scholars Symposium

The Young Scholars Symposium is an annual ILS initiative that convenes young scholars who are working on a dissertation, a book, or another research project related to Latinas and Latinos in the United States. Participants are chosen through a national call for applicants. 

Selected young scholars present a chapter or essay in advance of the symposium. The Distinguished Visiting Professor — who ILS also brings to campus annually — serves as mentor and commentator for symposium participants and their work. ILS faculty members and graduate students also participate in the symposium sessions. The goal is to create an enriching environment that provides mentorship in the profession and enhance scholarly work. 

The canceled 2020 symposium was reschedule to March 18-19, 2021. Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the event was held virtually. Charlene Villaseñor Black, Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, served as the ILS Distinguished Visiting Scholar and mentor to the Young Scholars selected in this national competition. 

Each scholar presents a completed essay, chapter, or manuscript up to 30 pages in length, previously reviewed by both the Distinguished Visiting Professor Villaseñor Black and members of the Notre Dame faculty. All expenses are covered by ILS including an honorarium of $250 for up to eight participants selected from a broad national pool of applicants. Participants have two full business days of presentations and working group meetings.

The Spring 2021 Distinguished Scholar Lecture with Charlene Villaseños Black titled “Thinking about Migration through Latinx Art” was held on March 18 and is available for public viewing in the ILS YouTube channel.

Charlene Villaseñor Black is Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; Associate Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center; editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (LALVC, UC Press).

She publishes on a range of topics related to Chicanx studies, contemporary Latinx art, and the early modern Iberian world. To date, she has won six awards for her editing work, including most recently, two awards recognizing LALVC as outstanding new journal. Her most recent book, with Dr. Mari-Tere Álvarez of the Getty Museum, is Renaissance Futurities: Art, Science, Invention, published in 2019. She recently co-edited the new Chicano Studies Reader (2020); Autobiography Without Apology: The Personal Essay in Latino Studies (2020); and Knowledge for Justice: An Ethnic Studies Reader (2019); in addition to editing Shifra M. Goldman’s final book, Tradition and Transformation: Chicana/o Art from the 1970s to the 1990s (2015).

Her monograph on colonial saints, tentatively entitled Transforming Saints: Women, Art, and Conversion in Spain and Mexico, 1521-1800 is forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press in early 2022. Her 2006 book, Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire won the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss award. In 2016 she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence, bestowed annually on one faculty member in recognition of exceptional teaching, innovative research, and strong commitment to university service.

She has held grants from the Fulbright, Mellon, Borchard, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, the NEH, the ACLS, and the Getty. Currently, she is PI of “Critical Mission Studies at California’s Crossroads,” a $1.03 million dollar grant from the University of California’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives. She will be at Oxford University next year as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art.