Yolanda Valencia, assistant professor of geography and environmental studies, and María Célleri, assistant professor of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies, have received 12-month Career Enhancement Fellowships, funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. They represent two of nine junior faculty recipients across the country from hundreds of applicants in the 2022 award cycle. Their achievement marks the first time two UMBC junior faculty have received this award simultaneously. 

The Career Enhancement Fellowship seeks to increase the presence of underrepresented junior and other faculty members in the humanities, social sciences, and arts by creating career development opportunities for selected Fellows with promising research projects. Valencia and Célleri will dedicate their fellowship to advancing their book projects.

Thriving and oppressive geographies

In the forthcoming book Relational Life: Legal Death, Valencia will explore the Mexican immigrant community of Pasco, Washington, and how this community creates places of peace, tranquility, and family—places of belonging and meaning— under disadvantaged conditions. Her writing draws on years of fieldwork in Pasco, transnational ethnography, archival research, interviews with city leaders, and testimonies from undocumented Mexican immigrants. 

“My research reveals that the city of Pasco maintains conditions that exploit immigrant labor by enforcing police violence, criminalization, and intimidation,” says Valencia. “I aim to provide a historical political economy analysis of geographies of oppression overlaid with an analysis of spaces where this community thrives, as they both happen simultaneously across scale, time, and border.” 

While at UMBC, Valencia has designed three upper-level human geography courses: Geographies of Migration, Latin American Geographies, and Qualitative Methods. She is also developing graduate seminars focused on Geographies of Conquest and Liberation.

Community of support

In addition to the Career Enhancement Fellowship, Valencia has been selected as a 2020 – 2022 Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement (SITPA) Scholar. SITPA is a mentoring and professional initiative designed to facilitate junior faculty members’ successful transition to tenured associate professor status. 

The goal of SITPA is to address the persistent underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minority faculty in academia. The program is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is administered and hosted by the Center for the Study of Race Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences (REGSS) at Duke University

“SITPA for me means an opportunity to be part of a diverse community of support in academia, which is helping me carve spaces of belonging as a scholar in higher education,” says Valencia. Mérida Rúa, professor of Latino/a studies at Northwestern University and editor of Latino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla, is her mentor for both awards.

Politics and symbolism of monuments

Uncovering the Virgen del Panecillo: Quito’s Postcolonial Urban Transformation and Decolonial Future is the tentative title of Célleri’s upcoming book. She uses print media, film, photography, and decolonial feminist social, cultural, and political analysis to bring greater understanding to the political and symbolic importance of the Virgen del Panecillo. This well-known monument is a 41-meter-tall aluminum statue of the Virgin of Immaculate Conception placed in Quito, Ecuador’s colonial city center in 1976. 

“I demonstrate that uncovering the contentious history of monuments opens the possibilities for reimagining them as sites of decolonial feminist futures,” says Célleri. 

“I frame the book around what I term Andean decolonial feminist imaginaries,” she explains. “This is a framework that centers Andean Indigenous cosmology as a tool for comprehensively confronting long-standing colonial logics of social control that haunt Quito’s urban landscape, and which materially affect racialized and gendered populations.”

Connecting with fellow researchers

In 2019, Célleri served as a panelist at the National Women’s Studies Association annual conference (on the theme “Protest, Justice, and Transnational Organizing”) and at the Sexuality and Borders Symposium at New York University. There she presented her research on transnational feminist struggles for reproductive rights in the Andes in relation to appropriations of the monument of the Virgen del Panecillo.

“The Career Enhancement Fellowship is a recognition of my hard work and offers the opportunity to work collaboratively on my book project with colleagues and mentors that I admire,” says Célleri. Maria Amelia Viteri, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and senior social and gender specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank, will mentor Célleri during her fellowship. Viteri is a recognized transnational sociocultural anthropologist of globalization, gender, queer, and migration studies.

Over the past two years at UMBC, Célleri has organized the Latin American Feminisms Working Group through UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities. She teaches Transnational Feminist Film and the course on Gender, Humans Rights, and Political Violence in Latin America. She will teach Indigenous and Decolonial Feminisms, a course she developed, after her fellowship.

Continuing excellence 

Valencia and Célleri came to UMBC in 2019. Their work continues a strong history of UMBC scholarship earning recognition and support from the Mellon Foundation and Institute for Citizens and Scholars. 

Last year, Sharon Tran, assistant professor of English, became the fifth UMBC faculty member in the humanities to receive the prestigious award. The fellowship supported her book project, Minor Forms: The Affective and Aesthetic Economies of Asian Girlhood. The book examines how the minor figure of the “Asian girl” can provide a new way of understanding U.S. racism and imperialism.

“What an honor for two of our colleagues to be acknowledged by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars amongst this stellar group of junior faculty,” says Moffitt. “Kudos to them both for their efforts to shed light on important lived experiences.”

Both of this year’s recipients will return to teach and share their work at UMBC after their one-year fellowship. 

Noemi Petra, Ph.D. ’10, M.S. ’07, applied mathematics, has always been a hard worker. In her dissertation research at UMBC, she forayed into engineering applications, mathematical theory, and computational techniques to answer questions about sensors that detect trace gases, such as carbon monoxide.

“Most math students delve into one of these three general areas of research during their Ph.D.,” explains one of her mentors, John Zweck, former UMBC faculty member in mathematics and statistics. Petra tackled all three.

Petra’s grit has paid off. The National Science Foundation has recognized her ongoing research success with the NSF Career Award, intended to support early-career faculty “who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.” It is one of the most prestigious awards an early-career STEM researcher can receive. Petra’s award, the first for a UMBC graduate in mathematics, provides $400,000 for her work over five years. Previous UMBC Career Award recipients have supported faculty projects in areas as diverse as developmental biology and artificial intelligence.

The first in her family to attend college, at the University of Babes-Bolyai in Romania, Petra’s willingness to take on new challenges has served her well throughout her career. After UMBC, she was a postdoctoral fellow and then a research associate at The University of Texas at Austin within the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES)  in the prestigious Center for Computational Geosciences and Optimization led by Professor Omar Ghattas, who was also Petra’s postdoctoral mentor. From there, Petra transitioned to the University of California, Merced, where she is now an assistant professor and maintains collaborations with a variety of renowned institutions.

“I think the experience of having to make progress on a very applied problem turned out to be an excellent training ground for Noemi,” explains Zweck, now professor of mathematical sciences at University of Texas at Dallas, “because it gave her the confidence and experience to tackle much harder applied problems in her postdoc and now in her faculty position.”

Her research interests have evolved from gas sensors to other applications for similar mathematical techniques. One of her current projects seeks to model how ice sheets flow using differential equations—a very difficult problem, considering it’s impossible to directly observe some of the required parameters. She applies the same type of problem-solving to model power distribution in electrical grids, which could help make them more efficient in the future.

Petra sees the award as “the result of a long, but extremely exciting and rewarding professional journey.” In particular, she says, UMBC “offered the perfect environment to grow as a researcher and educator. The careful mentorship during my Ph.D. and the diverse set of graduate classes I took at UMBC helped me obtain a very successful postdoctoral fellowship, which led to where I am today. For this I am very grateful.”

“Noemi was a wonderful student to work with,” shares another of Petra’s mentors, Susan Minkoff, faculty in the UMBC math and statistics department from 2000 – 2012 and now at the University of Texas at Dallas. “I felt like we were losing a friend when she graduated.”

Petra says Minkoff “helped me a lot to build confidence and not feel intimidated in a male-dominated environment such as STEM,” and now she plans to support future generations of mathematicians. The award will allow her “to undertake an ambitious agenda that includes cutting-edge research and mentoring for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels,” and she is particularly looking forward to dedicating “a significant part of my efforts toward mentoring and preparing students for careers in applied mathematics and computational science.”

Part of that mentorship will involve teaching students how to handle the uncertainty inherent to her field. “Finding the right problem to solve goes hand-in-hand with the solving process,” she says, which is part of what makes the work exciting. “It is like going on a trip without knowing a specific destination.”

– Sarah Hansen M.S. ’15

Photo credit: Veronica Adrover for UC Merced

Mario Angulo Alvarado ‘15, political science, wants to bring positive change to his community. Studying at the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) campus, he made a start on his life’s ambition by serving as USG Student Council president, with guidance from Dr. Andrew Nolan and Chelsea Moyer, program coordinator and Peer Advisory Team manager. He has received numerous scholarships and honors while at UMBC, and this spring the political science department recognized his contributions through the Outstanding Scholar-Leader Award. After graduation, he will continue in a position he started as a student at the nonprofit organization Identity, which serves Latino youth and their families.

Amelia Meman ‘15, gender and women’s studies, understands that even among high-achieving students, not many create a major university program that regularly rallies students around a shared passion for community impact. But Amelia did just that with Critical Social Justice, a campus-wide initiative promoting civic engagement and critical thinking around social justice and the related challenges today’s communities face. During her UMBC career Amelia combined campus leadership, participation in national conferences, and a research assistantship in gender and women’s studies with stellar academic work. She earned a 4.0 GPA and election to Phi Beta Kappa. Inspired by mentor Dr. Kate Drabinski, she plans to earn a Ph.D. in women’s studies following her AmeriCorps service.

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