Awards
Graduate student Amanda Vilchez was awarded a Summer 2025 Rare and Distinctive (RAD) Language Fellowship from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The RAD fellowship provides students the opportunity to achieve proficiency in some of the world’s least frequently taught languages. Amanda received a $3500 stipend and $3120 toward fees and tuition, which she will apply to the study of Quechua at the Escuela Cusqueña de Quechua in Cusco, Peru. She chose to study Quechua because the communities she works with for her dissertation are bilingual in Quechua and Spanish.
Conferences & Symposia
Professor Katherine Sender presented a paper entitled “The Queer Vanguard: How Television Streaming Platforms Promoted Intersectional LGBTQ+ Content to Establish their Brands” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference.
This paper proposes the idea of the queer vanguard to describe how streaming platforms innovated intersectional LGBTQ+ narratives and characters to consolidate their brands and to build market share transnationally. Taking Netflix's "Queer Eye" as a case study, it questions the commitment of these platforms to sustained LGBTQ+ representation and employment.
Events
Please join us for COMMColloquium Monday, April 21, 3:00 pm, in 102 Mann Library Building. Graduate student Lucas Wright will be presenting “The Political Economy of Trust and Safety Vendors, and Other Markets for Digital Regulation Compliance.” The colloquium is followed by a reception, located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Lectures
Assistant Professor Wunpini Mohammed gave a talk in the University of Richmond’s Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies on her forthcoming book, Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-Righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana.
In her lecture, Wunpini invited us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through African epistemologies and knowledge systems, her book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures, and traditions can completely shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language, and media.
