Announcing the 2024-2025 Public Humanities Fellows!

Using home movies to document Asian American histories. Bringing to light the contribution of immigrants to the city of Edmonds. Sharing the voice of Latinx/e communities in Walla Walla and southeastern Washington. These are the dynamic projects led by the new group of 2024-2025 Public Humanities Fellows: Sarah Choi, Polly Hana Yorioka, Camilo E. Lund-Montaño, and Mariana Ruiz-Gonzalez. Humanities Washington is proud to welcome this amazing cohort.

The Public Humanities Fellows program funds and supports opportunities for early-career humanists with innovative projects, delivering original programs and events to underserved communities in Washington. Their projects will be planned and presented from October to June. Watch for more details in the coming months!

Meet the Fellows:

Camilo Lund-Montaño and Mariana Ruiz-Gonzalez

Visualizing the Past and Present of Latinx/e Communities in Walla Walla County

Their project will collect, preserve and publicize oral histories and photographs from the Latinx/e communities to diversify the region’s visual culture and acknowledge Latinx/e representation and voices within Walla Walla and Southeastern Washington.

Mariana Ruiz-González is an assistant professor in the Hispanic Studies Department at Whitman College. She has a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Cultural Studies from Arizona State University. Her research interests are Latinx/Latin America Cultural and Visual Studies, Popular Culture, and Animal Studies. Her work has been published in the critical volumes of Transgresiones en las letras latinoamericanas: visiones del lenguaje poético (2021), Transnational American Spaces (Vernon Press, 2021), The Selena Reader: “Entre a mi Mundo,” among others.

Camilo E. Lund-Montaño is an assistant professor of history at Whitman College. He received his bachelor’s from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, his M.A. in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are social movements in the 20th century and transnational networks of solidarity between the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean. His article “Undesirable Travelers: U.S. Radicals, Mexican Security, and the Cold War Summer of 1968” appeared in The Global Sixties Journal.

Sarah Choi

Reactivating and Reclaiming Asian American Memories through Home Movies

Recognizing the significance of home movies in remembering and reimagining Asian American histories, this project will implement a grassroots storytelling program that is dedicated to home movie screenings and preservation.

Sarah Choi is a doctoral candidate in Cinema and Media studies at the University of Washington. Her research interests include orphan film archives and found footage filmmaking. Sarah is the recipient of the 2024-2025 AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship, 2021 Barclay Simpson Scholars in Public Fellowship, and the 2022 Simpson Center Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship. As a filmmaker, she creates screendance and documentaries and curates films for the Lights Dance Festival, which she founded in 2016. She served as the managing editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal from 2022-2023.

Polly Hana Yorioka

Immigrant History of Edmonds Virtual Exhibit

The Immigrant History of Edmonds Virtual Exhibit is designed to showcase the impact of immigrants from the earliest settling of the city all the way to highlighting today’s vibrant “international district” of Edmonds.

Polly is a recent graduate of the University of Washington’s Museology MA program, with an MAIS in Comparative Religion and a BA in Classics from the University of Puget Sound. Polly’s professional background is in nonprofit community development, particularly working with international students. In her current role as exhibit curator for the Edmonds Historical Museum, Polly is dedicated to telling the stories of underrepresented communities and building intercultural relationships.