Duke Graduate School

Drs. Palmar Álvarez-Blanco and Steven L. Torres, co-founders of ALCESXXI, present their model for a socially-engaged professional association in the humanities.

"I gravitate towards work that focuses on creating new systems, processes, and cultures that are aligned with values around equity. This country was founded and built upon systems that were designed to foster inequality between folks of different gender expressions and between different racial groups. These things are deeply ingrained and embedded in every system and organization. I am especially interested in how individuals change beliefs and understandings around issues of equity."

An unexpected opportunity with Bass Connections helped this graduate student make it through a difficult pandemic year. 

"I was only on the academic job market once, but during that time I felt like departments were looking for a different kind of work than what I was doing in the Multicultural Center and thought I was doing as well in my dissertation. I realized that we thought about the field of 19^th-century multi-ethnic work very differently. I thought of it as more comparative or relational work, but the departments I interviewed with were looking for more clear-cut sub-fields. This experience of confronting disciplinary assumptions, combined with the autonomy I had in my other job, where my academic training was appreciated but not being put under scrutiny, made following a non-faculty track feel like the best of both worlds. I started to see a way to stay in the university, but in a different role and context."