Professor Karma R. Chávez has just been selected as the 2011-12 recipient of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for the Humanities’ First Book Project Award. A very competitive process, the First Book program is an initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that supports the efforts of one tenure-track junior faculty member per year, selected from across the Humanities and interpretive Social Sciences, “to turn solid and promising manuscripts into first-rate books.” The program will create a workshop around Professor Chávez’s work, flying in two external readers and gathering five to seven internal readers who will meet in Madison in Spring 2012 to work with her to revise the manuscript of her first academic book and place it with a press.
Professor Chávez joined the Department of Communication Arts in the Rhetoric area in 2010, shortly after receiving her PhD from Arizona State University. Her research explores the relationship between gender, sexuality, and immigration in the United States, as well as social movement building and LGBT equality and politics. In the past year alone, she has published a handful of articles in some of the field’s most prestigious journals, including Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies in Communication. An essay published in Women’s Studies in Communication also recently won her the 2011 Feminist Scholar Award from the Organization for Research on Women and Communication (ORWAC). Professor Chávez is also an affiliate faculty member in Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at UW-Madison, as well as a co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network.
More information about the First Book Project can be found here.