Professor Lillian Gorman is now a triple award winner for her first book Zones of Encuentro: Language and Identities in Northern New Mexico, collecting two early 2026 prizes after a 2025 New Mexico Book Award. 

Gorman, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Spanish as a Heritage Language Program, published Zones of Encuentro with the Ohio State University Press Global Latin/o Américas series in October 2024. 

In January, Gorman received notification of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education’s Book Award in the Mid-Career scholar category. In February, the Latinx Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association announced Gorman as the winner of the Book Award in the Humanities category. 

The two new awards follow the October announcement of Gorman receiving the New Mexico Book Award in the Multicultural category and being named a finalist in the categories of First Book and BIPOC Author or Subject. 

“I’m honored for the awards and I’m proud for where each of these awards come from,” Gorman said. “They speak to different areas the book is being read and recognized.” 

Zones of Encuentro builds on work Gorman began in her dissertation, studying Spanish-speaking and bilingual communities in northern New Mexico, where her family is from. 

“There wasn’t a lot of research on northern New Mexico that really teased out the heterogeneity of Latino identity,” she said. 

The book is an in-depth look at the cultural and linguistic interactions between two distinct Latina/o/x communities in the region: Nuevomexicanos, families with historic roots in the region, and first-generation Mexicano immigrants. Nuevomexicanos have historically spoken Traditional New Mexican Spanish, while the recent immigrants tend to speak Mexican Spanish. 

Gorman examined the everyday lived language experiences and ethnolinguistic identities of Mexicanos and Nuevomexicanos together, specifically through the case of mixed Mexicano-Nuevomexicano families. The book analyzed the language ideologies, identity formations, and language practices in relation to the complex encounters between the Mexicano-Nuevomexicano families. 

Gorman says the New Mexico Book Award was the best she could have received because New Mexico is the first place she wanted the book to be recognized. 

The American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education was an entirely different audience for the book. “It’s speaking to how these issues of language and identity connect to broader issues of Latinos and higher education. I’m glad the association saw the importance of the book,” Gorman said. 

In the Humanities category, the jury for the Latinx Studies Section award wrote that Gorman’s book is “an original and vital contribution to the field.” 

“This book makes a timely and conceptually innovative contribution to Latinx Studies by introducing ‘zones of encuentro’ as a framework for understanding intra-Latinx tensions and solidarities,” wrote the jury. “Its interdisciplinary and transparent design—combining interviews, pláticas, and linguistic ethnography, with appendices featuring bilingual guides and supporting tables and figures—provides a rigorous and accessible model for sustaining its central arguments.” 

The American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education award will be presented the last weekend of March. 

Also, the AAHHE’s Book Award in the Senior Scholar Category will be presented to fellow University of Arizona faculty member Nolan Cabrera, Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Practice, for his book Banned! The Fight For Mexican American Studies in the Streets and the Courts, written with Robert S. Chang, Professor of Law and Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights at UC Irvine. 

Margaree Little, a poet and translator pursuing a master’s degree in Russian, has been named as a finalist for the 2026 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. 

Little’s translation, At the Edge: Selected Political Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, was published in November by Green Linden Press, highlighting an overlooked side of one of Russian’s best-known 20^th century poets. 

“I came to her poems first in English translation, and the poems which have been translated into English are mainly her love poems,” Little said. “She had a very tumultuous, complicated personal life and those poems have been emphasized in English. I started to read her work that way, but there would be small excerpts of a poem here or there that were more political, so I began to be curious about that. Looking at the original work, she wrote a lot in this vein, but her poems that speak to these huge historical events she was living through had largely been neglected.” 

When she first began reading Tsvetaeva, Little didn’t know the Russian language at all. Later, she started teaching English at the University of Arizona and enrolled in undergraduate classes to begin learning. Last fall, she enrolled in the master’s degree program to gain advanced Russian proficiency. 

“The poems made me want to learn the language,” Little said. “As with any poet, the language of Tsvetaeva’s poems is distinctly her own. The way she uses the language is very compressed. It’s not conversational.” 

Born in 1892 to a wealthy family, Tsvetaeva lived most of her life in poverty and exile, following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow Famine. She wrote about the personal as well as the political, extensively, until her death in 1941. 

At the Edge focuses on Tsvetaeva’s experiences living through turbulent history, including the poetic sequence that Little first worked to translate in 2016, written in response to the Munich Agreement and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. The parallels between Tsvetaeva’s experiences in the first half of the 20^th century and world events today make the poems powerful, Little said. 

“They’re specific to the events they’re talking about, but at the same time, they have a resonance where many of them feel as though they could be written today,” she said. “Many people have pointed out the historical parallels between those events and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the failure of the Western democracies to prevent this full-scale invasion. There are parallels to what we’re seeing now in the United States, with the rise of fascism and nationalism, and I think for many people, values that we may have assumed we shared as a society, seeing these values torn apart.”

Little is interested in continuing to translate Tsvetaeva’s poetry, as well as the work of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, contemporaries who also wrote about living through the revolution and the rise of Stalinism and whose work was censored or disappeared in their lifetimes. And Little’s goal isn’t just to focus on work that hasn’t been translated to English, but to revisit poems for more accurate translations. 

“When I was looking these poems up word by word and trying to understand the etymology, the grammatical structures, the cultural references, it became evident to me that her work has been mistranslated and misrepresented,” Little said. “People have taken significant liberties with poems and actually changed them in English, often with certain ideas the translators may have had of the poet, the stereotype of a doomed hysterical woman. Many people just accept these translations as Tsvetaeva, but they’re not that close to the original poems. So, I also felt an ethical imperative to translate the poems as closely as possible to the originals.” 

In particular, At the Edge represents a side of Tsvetaeva’s work that’s similar to Little’s own poetry. Her book REST (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2019 Audre Lorde Award, emerged from work she was doing in the borderlands of Southern Arizona, working with No More Deaths to provide direct aid to migrants in the desert. 

“I was with a group of volunteers who found the remains of someone who died in the desert and has never been identified. My book emerged out of that experience and is a series of poems thinking about who this man was and what it means to care for or respect another human life when there’s so much we don’t know,” she said. “There are themes that connect my own poetry with the translation work I’m interested in, themes of violence or erasure, but also a sense of survival and resistance and memory.” 

Little said she feels fortunate that the University of Arizona provides her with an opportunity to explore those important themes in different ways. In addition to coursework and pursuing translation, she co-teaches Intermediate Russian, which provides a different perspective on the language. 

“The Russian and Slavic Studies Department is wonderful and has been so supportive of my path with learning the language, and why I ended up deciding to pursue the graduate program. I’m happy to have the book come out at a time I’m able to be a part of the department,” she said. “The College of Humanities has also been wonderful, and it feels like an intellectual home for my work.” 

As far as the PEN award, which will be presented at the Literary Awards Ceremony on March 31 in New York, Little said being in a group of finalists whose work presents translations from Spanish, Arabic and Chinese is a gratifying endorsement of the art of translation itself. 

“It’s wonderful that PEN has this award to recognize translation,” she said. “Sometimes in the U.S. we are in a little bit of a bubble as far as reading literature from other parts of the world and other traditions. All of the books on the list are remarkable and important. It’s wonderful to have access to that kind of work from all over the world and different periods of time.” 

Born in Tucson, Felipe Garcia grew up speaking both Spanish and English. When it came time to study a language in high school, he added French to the mix. 

Garcia is a student at the University of Arizona’s W.A. Franke Honors College pursuing dual bachelor’s degrees in political science and creative intelligence and innovation, along with a minor in French. He was appointed to the Arizona Board of Regents by Gov. Katie Hobbs in May 2025. 

In the first year of his two-year term, Garcia is focused on expanding opportunities for students in the Arizona-Mexico region and improving educational attainment, support services and development opportunities for students.

Garcia’s resume reflects a strong commitment to public service. He serves as a youth commissioner on Gov. Hobbs’ Commission on Service and Volunteerism, and was recently a Courage Fellow with GIFFORDS, the gun violence prevention group founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He previously served as undersecretary general of international coordination with Arizona Model United Nations and as the presidential chief of staff for the Associated Students of the University of Arizona. 

As one of two Student Regents, Garcia represents the nearly 250,000 students at U of A, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University. As a trilingual speaker and a French minor, Garcia spoke to the College of Humanities about being an advocate for the humanities. 

Q: Why do you think the humanities are so important?

A: To me, the humanities are vital because time and time again they help us adapt to the times. Take artificial intelligence. As more tasks become automated, whether it’s writing or image creation, the question becomes how do we as humans continue to be a part of the force that’s driving the world? The humanities have that answer and guide how we realize the applications for AI. 

Q: What would you say to recommend to a student to major or minor in French, or any of the other Humanities disciplines?

A: For my degrees, political science and creative intelligence and innovation, I really looked at it as, ‘Where do I want to work, and how do I get there?’ For the humanities, it was switching that and saying ‘What are the skills I want to have?’ because that really opens your horizons and increases the opportunities you’re mentally prepared for. For French specifically, what I like about it is that it’s a U.N. language, and it’s adaptations are useful all around the world. For example, Québécois French is very different than the French spoken in Togo. Learning those differences, and really understanding the cultural and historical nuance behind them, is a very holistic opportunity. 

Q: As a trilingual student, how has language learning impacted your life? And why did you choose French?

A: I grew up speaking Spanish all my life, and then I learned English at an early age. I started to studying French in high school, and found that it’s very similar to Spanish, being a romance language, so I was able to pick it up pretty easily. I really wanted to continue learning the language here. Because there aren’t many Francophones in Arizona, I wanted to make sure I was able to maintain my knowledge of the language. It’s really opened a lot of doors for me. It’s really cool to be able to access a different part of the world. 

Q: As a minor in French, are you interested in studying abroad?

A: My fingers are crossed that I get to study abroad next summer. It’s one of the only times in your life when you get to go abroad with so much support and have a program that helps you get the most out of it. I’ve traveled a bit to France and other places, and the experiences that come out of that are a holistic educational experience. It’s not just the classroom, but the environment outside of it. I was on the streets of Lyon late one night, and a French woman flagged me down and asked for help parking. I didn’t know the word for steering wheel or wheels, but we figured it out. What I really learned was to communicate when I didn’t know the words, and that skill is useful anywhere. 

Q: The U of A ranks fifth in the country in producing graduates with language degrees – How does that set the university apart? What’s the importance of language studies, for majors and minors, but students of other majors as well?  

A: This designation really sets the U of A apart. Teaching languages produces really well-rounded students. Like the humanities in general, it teaches students not just the importance of being a member of a participatory democracy, but how to be global citizens. We have an increasingly global economy, and Arizona is so reliant on international investment, so it’s really important to have those language skill to be able to relate to business partners or employers. 

Q: Why is it important for alumni, majors and minors of advocate humanities and language studies to advocate for those programs? 

A: As students, it’s not always easy to see what’s in the realm of possibility and what’s out there. I just read an article about a U of A French graduate who works at Netflix. I never would’ve guessed you could land a job at Netflix. For things like that, it’s cool to know as a student that your education is giving you skills that are versatile wherever you go. That’s the best mindset to have. 

When we talk about applied humanities, alumni are the people who are applying those skills. That’s really where it’s happening. As a student, it may not always be easy to see how the skills you learn in a particular program will translate to the workforce. But as so many U of A grads have shown, a humanities degree or a language degree is applicable anywhere, not just in a geographic sense but also in a disciplinary sense. It’s really cool to see those graduates and those alumni applying their skills. In addition, from a practical perspective, it creates community. It’s great to hear about the success of U of A grads all around the world. 

Q: What are your own goals as far as a career or how do you see yourself combining your different areas of study? 

A: I wish I had a concrete answer for that, but I’m looking at international work. I did model United Nations in college and high school as well. The United Nations and its related nonprofits are incredible opportunities, maybe even the United States foreign service, or work here in Arizona through some Arizona-Mexico work. 

A new student club focused on the intersection of health and humanities launched this semester, giving students with a variety of majors and career interests an opportunity to collaborate on shared interests. 

According to its mission statement, the Health Humanities Collective is “a student-led organization at the University of Arizona that brings together students interested in exploring health, illness, and care through storytelling, ethics, creative practice, and interdisciplinary dialogue.” 

After gaining official recognition from the Associated Students of the University of Arizona, the Health Humanities Collective began meeting in February, drawing about 15 students to meetings as the fledgling club begins hosting activities and planning for the future. 

“The club is all about different dimensions of health and overall human well-being. We know the humanities are so expansive, we wanted something that was more accessible and could encompass all of health humanities,” said Mykelti Nuamah, a senior majoring in Religious Studies for Health Professionals and Physiology and Medical Sciences. 

The Health Humanities Collective grew out of the Health Humanities Hub Interdisciplinary Scholar program, which launched last spring to offer internships to students majoring in the College of Humanities who are interested in health-related careers.

Nuamah, who started as an H3 Interdisciplinary Scholar in the fall and is continuing this semester, said the scholars wanted a way to allow humanities students to be involved, without a full internship. Planning for the Health Humanities Collective extended across different cohorts of H3 Interdisciplinary Scholars and a funding opportunity presented itself in the fall, when the Center for Buddhist Studies created the new Integrative Well-Being Prize. 

Nuamah, founder and current president of the Health Humanities Collective, was awarded $1,000 in seed funding to start the group and support a retreat in the works for later this semester. 

Nuamah said that as he progressed through his two majors, he knew he couldn’t be the only student drawn to humanities approaches to health and well-being and now the Health Humanities Collective gives like-minded students a place to gather, collaborate and support one another. 

“At our last meeting, two students who hadn’t met before were both Religious Studies majors, but both had a completely unrelated second major. It was interesting to see how these fields interconnect and there’s a lot to learn internally from each other. Interdisciplinary collaboration among ourselves is important and seeing where other people are at can help gauge where you’re at too,” he said. 

The Health Humanities Collective is structured with an executive committee made of committee chairs, the first two focusing on community engagement and health and well-being. A committee on art and expression is under discussion. But the structure allows for students to pursue any topic of interest. 

“The sky is the limit,” Nuamah said. “No matter what interest a student has, they can come and make a committee or collaborate with an event.” 

Health Humanities Hub Coordinator Christine Hoekenga said she’s been impressed by the wide variety of interests and projects the H3 Interdisciplinary Scholars have brought, and their initiative to launch a student club will benefit many more students in the future. 

“The students' mix of fields and backgrounds is a huge strength of this group. This type of interdisciplinary dialogue doesn’t just happen and it’s refreshing to see students seeking it out and building something with intention,” she said. “I’m excited to see how this truly student-driven Collective will take shape. Offering a way for all students to engage with health humanities topics, including integrative wellbeing practices, is a service to our campus and ultimately to the future health professionals who will eventually care for all of us.”  

To join or learn more, email healthhumanitiescollective@gmail.com or follow on Instagram: @uahealthhumanitiescollective. 

It’s natural to expect students in a language immersion program to quickly improve, but what is really happening? 

Wenhao Diao, Head of the Department of East Asian Studies, began doing research into language learning in study abroad programs in 2010, trying to measure linguistic gains, like how many words or syllables students could speak in a period of time. 

“We found some gains in oral fluency and proficiency, but it was missing the larger piece, so I started studying the interactions students had with people in these localities and the ways in which they used the language in identity development and relationships,” she said. “What does it mean to be a foreigner? How do you construct and express yourself? Students are building a transnational identity and developing the context to express who they are, rather than just conveying meaning.” 

Studying abroad provides students with nuanced, different ways to respond to concepts like identity and relationships. For a few weeks or months, their new day-to-day reality provides an entirely different context for using the language, Diao said. 

“It’s well established that when you study abroad, you become more fluent within a narrow linguistic definition. You’re able to produce more in the language, and that’s important. But I’m interested in the real-life language usage and the discovery of new ways of being and becoming,” she said. “Different languages provide different systems of meaning making. There are ways to express yourself and your identity in one language that might be different in other languages.” 

In the classroom, instructors tend to focus on “proper” language use, not teaching a lot of sociolinguistic variations that can be difficult to explain without seeing the context. For example, Diao took students on a Shanghai study abroad program to places like a “marriage market” where parents would try match-making for their adult children, or to visit college entrance exam sites.

“Study abroad is when students discover all these different ways of speaking and these varieties of linguistic constructions,” Diao said. “There are lots of nuanced ways of speaking that students learn when they are studying abroad and you see a kind of imagining of their future selves that’s a part of the language learning. That’s something that happens on top of the experience of travel, but it’s not something you’d get as a tourist.” 

For Janice McGregor, Associate Professor in the Department of German Studies, an academic interest in study abroad language learning came out of her own experiences as a student, interning three summers abroad and living with a host family. For her dissertation, she examined how deeply people get involved in the local community during a temporary stay. 

At the U of A, she’s led summer trips with students in the Arizona Summer Study in Leipzig program, and turned her research toward what kinds of strategies students are using in their short-term programs with their peers in language learning. 

“Sometimes that’s thought of as a negative since they’re associating with English speakers, but what I would see is students would be more playful with German because they have these other students with them who are also engaged with learning German,” she said. “I’d see students playing with language based around their shared experience and engaging with multilingualism even in these short-term programs.” 

McGregor has also begun researching student health and well-being in the context of study abroad, seeing how students manage issues of homesickness, illness and creating healthy routines in a new environment. Amidst other challenges, a feeling of acceptance and belonging can be crucial in seeing the value in both the travel experience and their progress in learning the language. 

“In a four-week program it can be as simple as getting acknowledged as a regular somewhere and getting this brief sense of belonging,” she said. “In the classroom, you get a lot of feedback from peers and instructors and that prepares you to see yourself stepping into this place. When you are there, there are these moments of recognition, even if they’re only a year into German study, when it’s quite thrilling to recognize things and pick up these exchanges.”   

The College of Humanities sends condolences to the family and friends of Stephen Douglas Todd, who passed away in January.

Steve was a generous supporter of the University of Arizona, creating the Stephen D. Todd Interdisciplinary Humanities Scholarship, which supports students studying in both the College of Humanities and the College of Agriculture, Life, and Environmental Sciences.

Read more in the Arizona Republic.

Basic language courses across the College of Humanities instruct thousands of University of Arizona students each semester, majors and non-majors alike, giving them the building blocks of a second language. 

But beyond the basic language classes, faculty members research and teach about multilingualism in broader contexts, specializing in how humans acquire and maintain languages, the various contexts in which people learn languages, successful language learning methods and strategies, and the intricate ties between language, culture, place and identity. 

Peter Ecke, Professor in the Department of German Studies, developed “Becoming Multilingual: Learning and Maintaining Two or More Languages” in 2015 to introduce undergraduate students to research on bilingual and multilingual people. The course includes information to show students how myths about bilingualism and language learning persist, as well as the realities.   

In the general education course, usually about half of the students describe themselves as monolingual or second language learners, and half describe themselves as bilingual and multilingual. 

Though its home department is German Studies, the course draws students from across campus, with high numbers of Hispanic and international students, as well as some Native American students. For some of those students, being bilingual is not something extraordinary or special, but examining misperceptions about multilingualism is an important part of the course.

“What these groups of students have in common are frequent challenges related to their perceived language proficiencies and cultural identities. Some may feel isolated or living in between cultures, not really belonging to a particular one. But in the course, these students realize that their experiences are shared by many others,” Ecke said. “Many students we have who come from African countries find their multilingualism totally normal and they may use three, four, or five languages regularly. They’re not equally fluent in all these languages, but each has its place and is used in their everyday life. In the course, they may reflect on their language use and issues of language loss.”

For some assignments, Ecke asks students to provide advice with respect to real-life scenarios, explaining responses to different challenges, for example, a friend or family seeking help about an international work opportunity, or a bilingual couple considering how to raise a child in terms of language and culture.

“They learn what it means to acquire, maintain and forget languages, and are provided with insights that help them make informed decisions as language learners in college, in their careers and in their families,” he said.

Associate Professor Liudmila Klimanova in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies focuses on the intersections of language studies, multilingualism, multiculturalism and identity.

“We can think about multilingualism as a borderland,” she said. “Knowing multiple languages gives you a set of skills that extends far beyond your linguistic ability to communicate and connect with different communities. Evidence shows that knowledge of multiple languages contributes to building comfort with uncertainty and reduces anxiety in complex situations, which adds a unique strength to someone’s professional identity.” 

Part of Klimanova’s research and teaching centers on the relationship between language, identity, and larger social and cultural contexts in Russia and the Post-Soviet world. Like other examples across space and time, sociolinguistic categories are created that can be tied to inclusion or exclusion. Essentially, monolingualism can become a political tool to impose control on segments of a population. 

“Multilingualism empowers you in so many different ways. It has given people a power to think independently, but there’s a history of suppression of multilingualism and bilingualism, when it’s perceived as a weapon,” she said. 

Studies and applications of multilingualism also consider how the linguistic diversity of a place impacts identity and how languages become inter-related. Southern Arizona is a good example, with more than 40 languages spoken in Tucson. The U of A is an Hispanic Serving Institution, but its multilingualism extends far beyond that. 

“Multilingual speakers really see the world differently. You learn a whole way of viewing and thinking about the world from people who bring multiple languages to the table,” she said. “That creates a very beautiful, multifaceted, rich understanding of what the world is all about, and translates into very important work-related skills and social skills.” 

In teaching her “Religion and Film” course, DeAnna Daniels centers on Black horror, using the genre as a way to understand religion and film in all of its multiplicities. 

Daniels and her students spend the semester exploring the relationship between religion and visual storytelling and analyzing various ideological and moral topics and messages. 

“Horror is the perfect genre,” Daniels said. “It provides catharsis, it provides escape and it helps you wrestle with those thoughts around what we are afraid of, culturally and societally, and wrestle with what happens after death. It gets to the questions of human existence and gives us an outlet to visually see them.” 

Daniels, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Religious Studies, extends the theme to her research, which includes a current project co-editing a collection called “The Sinners Reader: Black Horror, Black Religion(s), and Contemporary Popular Culture.” 

The prevalence of horror films across countries and cultures provides a number of different vantage points to consider the existential questions around death, the afterlife and what people both fear and embrace. 

“The western cosmological system is not the only one that experiences death and dying, or supernatural entities or spiritual beings,” Daniels said. “Taiwanese horror is going to have a conversation about the afterlife. Japanese horror is going to have a conversation about the afterlife. Black horror is going to have a conversation about the afterlife. These beings, these monsters, these entities, are going to help you wrestle through what’s possible. We don’t know what happens after death and horror is a great way to explore that.” 

As part of the 2025 Tucson Humanities Festival, Daniels shared a playlist of horror-related hip-hop songs on Halloween as a guest DJ on KXCI Community Radio. Daniels’ selections included: Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” discussing its stylistic music video and the connections between Afrofuturism and horror; Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s Grammy-winning “Tha Crossroads,” which she says offers a different perspective on theological concerns around how one dies well; and the Nicki Minaj verse on “Monster” as a metaphorical commentary on her artistry in a male-dominated arena. 

Daniels is a longtime fan of horror films, with the level of refined analysis she now brings to the genre developing throughout her academic journey. 

“I was always engaging with it, but I never had the language for it. Once it clicked, everything just made sense and it felt like a beautiful tapestry of connectivity. Now everywhere I go, I can say ‘That’s the horror, that’s the monster, that’s the gothic,’” she said. “It took time and education, but the themes were always there. Having the right vocabulary and tools to assess them properly came through education and Africana and Black Studies are prime for that.” 

Daniels said students often enroll in her course because they get to watch a film in class, but end up with an experience that goes beyond their expectations. 

“I think they stay because I have a pedagogy of tension. I want them to be uncomfortable, I want them to ask the uncomfortable questions and sit with what those answers might bring up,” Daniels said. “I just want them to think what’s possible, explore what they know already, find something new and try to tangle with it. Usually they’re ready to do the work.” 

Horror offers a lens to view experiences of being “othered,” whether that’s along lines of race, sexuality, gender and more, Daniels said. On screen, the monster, as well as the victims, can exist outside the norms of a society, but are given voice by the filmmakers. 

“How does the monster show up? What does the monster have to say? When they speak, it’s loud,” she said.