W.
Oliver Baker, an American Literary Studies Ph.D. candidate in the University of
New Mexico English Department, has been awarded the 2015-2016 Center for
Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship.
Baker
earned both his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In
his master's program, Baker studied American literature, rhetoric and
composition, while also serving as a graduate instructor, teaching and
assisting with writing, literature, and film courses. Baker joined the UNM
English Department in the fall of 2012. Baker’s areas of study include
nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, Critical Theory, Marxist
Cultural Theory, and Pedagogy. He also works as a UNM Graduate instructor in
Core writing, a Freshman Learning Communities instructor, and teaches courses
on American and World literature.
Baker
will use the CRS Torres Fellowship to research and draft his dissertation,
tentatively titled, “Literatures of Dispossession: Representing U.S. Settler
Colonialism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” which examines how American
literature from mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century offers a cultural
history of a key period in the development and expansion of U.S. settler
colonialism. The dissertation highlights the role of settler colonialism as a
structure of dispossession and its relationship to the processes of U.S.
industrialization and monopoly capitalism. In particular, Baker focuses on the
works of Indigenous, African American, and Mexican American writers of this
period, demonstrating how the form and style of their writings register the
uneven development and structural violence of settler colonialism and
capitalist expansion in North America. Dr. Jesse Alemán directs the
dissertation.
The
CRS Hector Torres Fellowship, a $10,000-$15,000 stipend, was inaugurated in
2010 by the University of New Mexico’s Center for Regional Studies in memory of
the English Department’s slain colleague. The fellowship
supports graduate research and scholarship in the English Department directly
related to the late Dr. Torres’ fields, as well as
the mission of the Center for Regional Studies. Areas include Chicano/a
literary and cultural studies; theory (i.e. Marxism; post-structuralism;
deconstruction; psychoanalysis; and globalization); film studies; and
scholarship related to the mission of the CRS, including history; archival
research; literature; and other interdisciplinary fields related to New Mexico,
the US-Mexico borderlands, and the greater southwest.
