Marcia Stephenson
Please join me in congratulating Marcia Stephenson, associate professor of Spanish and Latin American/Latino Studies for her nomination by the College of Liberal Arts for the Provost's 2015 Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor.
Marcia has served as a faculty mentor since arriving at Purdue. Soon after receiving tenure, she became the associate director and later director of Women's Studies. In that capacity, she held weekly meetings where graduate students could discuss their teaching and professionalism in the classroom and encouraged graduate students to become involved with conferences in their area of study. In the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Marcia has served as graduate advisor for students in the literature track. She mentors her dissertation advisees in the art of grant writing, and many have been recipients of year-long Purdue Research Fellowships and Bilsland Fellowships. Marcia’s areas of research include Latin American literature and Andean cultural studies. Her current research focuses on the exportation of Andean camelids (llamas and alpacas) from Peru to Europe from the mid-16th to mid-20th centuries, and contributes to her book project with the working title Natural and Unnatural Histories of Andean Camelids (Llamas and Alpacas) in the Transoceanic World: 1568–1970. Her work has been funded by grants from the College of Liberal Arts Center for Humanistic Studies, the Enhancing Research in the Humanities and Arts program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She also received a Purdue Faculty Fellowship for Study in a Second Discipline, spending a year in the College of Veterinary Medicine, where she was able to dissect a llama for her research, among other activities.
Congratulations to Dr. Stephenson for her outstanding work!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts