Andrew Husa, a lecturer in the Geography program, School of Global Integrative Studies, and Isabel Velázquez, an associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, have been named Fellows in the Center for Great Plains Studies.
Fellows publish research and book reviews, give talks, advise the Great Plains Art Museum, and sit on the Board of Governors and choose the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize winner.
Husa, an alumnus of the geography program who studied Human and Historical Geography under faculty member David Wishart, is the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Division Representative for the American Association of Geographers Rural Geography Group.
"My interests include small town geography and rural identity, and attachment to rural landscape, especially on the Great Plains," he said. "This love of the landscape has followed me since I was young, growing up on a farm outside of Liberty, Nebraska, a village of 76 people."
Velázquez's area of research includes sociolinguistic variation, Hispanic linguistics, bilingualism and language acquisition, heritage speaker pedagogy, language contact on the U.S./Mexico border, and the role of language in identity formations of U.S. Latinas. Her current research focuses on linguistic maintenance and loss among Latinx families in the Midwest.
She is the director of the digital archive Cartas a la Familia/Family Letters. On the Migration from Jesusita to Jane.
A total of 11 Fellows—those with appointments at the University of Nebraska—and seven Associate Fellows—those with appointments outside of the university system—were named. Candidates are nominated by a current Fellow.
"The Fellows program creates an organization of interdisciplinary Great Plains scholars at the University of Nebraska campuses and at other institutions across the globe," the center wrote in a tweet.
