SEATTLE, WA — The University of Washington Press, the MIT Press, Duke University Press, the University of Georgia Press, and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) today announce the recipients of the 2018–2019 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowships.

The Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowship was established in 2016 by the four university presses and the AUPresses as the first cross-press initiative of its kind in the United States to address the marked lack of diversity in the academic publishing industry. The initiative seeks to create a pipeline program of academic publishing professionals with significant personal experience and engagement with diverse communities and a demonstrated ability to bring the understanding gleaned from such engagement to bear on their daily work.

The program provides professional and financial support to cohorts of four fellows per year for three years. The yearlong appointments offer each fellow immersive, on-the-job training along with one-on-one mentoring and opportunities for networking and professional development. Fellows are given the opportunity to connect with one another and meet industry colleagues at two AUPresses annual meetings. Please join us in welcoming the 2018–2019 fellows!

The 2018–2019 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellows:

Caitlin Tyler-Richards joins the University of Washington Press from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is a PhD candidate in African history. Her research focuses on recentering Africa in book history, world literature, and popular fiction scholarship. Towards that end, her dissertation is a born-digital project on the shape of local and transnational fiction networks in Nigeria from 1945 to the present. She also enjoys speculative fiction from the global South, action movies featuring impossible white men, and defining “digital humanities.” Until recently, she lived in Missoula, Montana, with her partner and two dogs.

Jenny Tan joins Duke University Press from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently completing her PhD in comparative literature and medieval studies. Her scholarly work focuses on French medieval narratives and their reception in other language traditions. At Berkeley she has actively worked to challenge some of the disciplinary and institutional barriers that have reinforced the exclusion of questions of race and gender from medieval studies (and have made the field notably hostile to women and people of color). She also recently helped to organize an event on “Decolonizing Medieval Studies.”

Lea Johnson joins the University of Georgia Press from the University of California, San Diego, where she is a digital curator and PhD candidate in ethnic studies. Growing up between Los Angeles and Natchitoches, Louisiana, Lea developed an interest in circuits of culture and how black women negotiate space. Her interests include African American literature, the transnational South, and black feminist literary criticism. Currently, her dissertation explores race, gender, and the speculative literary imagination in the US South. She has also taught classes on the intersection of culture, art, and technology, helping students develop and experiment with creative projects across digital mediums. Her favorite books are Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

Nhora Lucía Serrano joins MIT Press from Hamilton College, where she has been a visiting assistant professor of comparative literature teaching interdisciplinary courses in visual narratives, virtual realities, cartography, and Latin America. Her recent professional experience and awards also include visiting scholar of comparative literature at Harvard University, 2018 Eisner Comic Industry Award judge, treasurer of the Comics Studies Society, Smithsonian National Postal Museum fellowship, and NEH Summer Institute on Modernism in Chicago. Originally from Colombia, she received her BA from Amherst College, MA from New York University, and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her scholarly work and editorial experience focus on visual studies and graphic arts books, comparative early modern and Latin American studies, digital humanities and technology, transnationalism, US Latinx studies, and immigration.

The fellowship program is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with a four-year $682,000 grant.