A professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University has won the 2019 LASA Latina/o Studies Frank Bonilla Public Intellectual Award.
Professor Frances Negrón-Muntaner won the award for her contributions to the Latino Studies field and the Latinx community, such as advocating for LGBTQ rights and AIDS awareness in the El Barrio neighborhood in East Harlem. She will receive the award on May 26 at the Latin American Studies Association meeting in Boston.
The award was originally established to honor Puerto Rican intellectual trailblazer Dr. Frank Bonilla, Thomas Hunter Professor Emeritus, who taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
“Most recently, [Negrón-Muntaner] was the co-creator of Valor y Cambio, a community-based storytelling and community-building project about Puerto Rican values surrounding social and economic transformations in the midst of the current debt crisis,” the university said in a news release.
Negrón-Muntaner, an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and scholar completed her Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology and Fine Arts at Temple University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Rutgers. In the past, she has received Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships, as well as Social Science Research Council and Andy Warhol Foundation grants.