A $750,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has been awarded to the University of Houston to establish a first-of-its-kind U.S. Latino Digital Humanities Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The program will give scholars expanded access to a vast collection of written materials produced by Latinos and archived by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literacy Heritage (“Recovery”) program and UH’s Arte Público Press, the nation’s largest publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by Hispanic authors from the United States.
Gabriela Baeza Ventura, associate professor of Hispanic literature, and Carolina Villarroel, Brown Foundation director of research for Arte Público Press, will oversee the grant. The new program will produce digital scholarship opportunities and projects based on the hundreds of thousands of available written works authored by Latinos from colonial times until 1960.