March 8, 2004

Awards and Honors

Kirsten Gruesz

Associate professor of literature Kirsten Gruesz has been awarded the prestigious Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). She is one of 10 recipients of the award out of a pool of 1,400. The fellowships support "long-term, unusually ambitious projects in the humanities and related social sciences."

The award provides a $75,000 stipend for residence at the Huntington Research Library in San Marino during the 2005-06 academic year. Gruesz will use the fellowship to work on her second book, "Material Languages: A Cultural History of Spanish in the United States." Gruesz noted that although most people in the U.S. see the tension between English and Spanish as a "new" problem, it has a long history that goes back to the colonial and early national periods.

"My study will retrace changing historical perceptions among Anglo-Americans of the Spanish language and its speakers, and will consider those perceptions in the context of the development of a distinctively Latino social presence and cultural expression within the U.S.," Gruesz said. "The book will detail how, over time, English speakers in the U.S. developed a complex attitude of attraction and repulsion toward the use of Spanish as a language of commerce, culture, and public life."

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