Professional Activities

Meg Henning has received a $5,337 grant from the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation for “Community Health Workers: A Critical Cross Cultural Perspective.” This award provides funds to support travel to Botswana, Africa to research the role of community health workers and the training they receive in an international setting.

Rafael Ponce-Cordero, Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages, organized and chaired a session on digital literature in the Hispanic world at the annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association held in Toronto, Canada at the beginning of May. The panel, entitled “Las literaturas hispanas en el laberinto digital,” featured presentations dealing with literature via Twitter (or Twitterature), the poetization of science in Silvia Veloso’s Sistema en caos y máquina, and Doménico Chiappe’s digital novel Hotel Minotauro. Additionally, Dr. Ponce-Cordero co-organized two interconnected sessions on comedy in comics, which included papers on Marvel’s She-Hulk, queer costumed crime-fighters, the quixotification of the superhero genre, the work of illustrator and writer Keith Giffen, and comedic reinterpretations of the superhero in online fan communities, among other topics. The second of those panels included Dr. Ponce-Cordero’s own presentation “De-centering Kal-El: Superlópez and the Politics of Peripheral Parody in Comics,” which discussed the Superman parody Superlópez, one of the most beloved comic-book characters in Spain.