UR Professor Receives Grant to Study Latin American Magazines

Mariela Mendez, University of Richmond associate professor of Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies has been awarded a $20,000 collaborative grant from the Chilean National Commission on Scientific and Technological Investigation to research feminist contributions in Latin American and American magazines.

Along with scholars from Chile, Argentina, and the U.S., Mendez will participate in a two-year project that will advance scholarship on Latin American magazines of the twentieth century. The project aims to solidify the study of Latin American magazines, and better understand their role in social, political, cultural, economic projects.  

“Periodical Studies have recently become a vibrant field of research, but a systematic approach to the study of magazines in Latin America doesn’t exist,” said Mendez. “More importantly, women’s participation in the periodical press still deserves more substantial and sustained attention.”

Mendez will join the team of researchers in Santiago, Chile this March to kick off the project. An International Symposium and a book are among the final outcomes.

“I am thrilled to engage in meaningful work that can yield incredible findings across and beyond national borders while helping provide a methodology and a framework for the study of magazines as cultural artifacts,” said Mendez.

An expert on the advocacy of feminist intellectuals in Latin American press of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mendez also plans to collaborate with the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement to design a class that explores how political figures like Rosa Dixon Bowser, Maggie Lena Walker, Janie Porter Barrett, and others used the press as a platform for their social reform work in the U.S.

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