CRS Graduate Student Fellowships 2026-2027
Profiles of the CRS Fellows
Profiles of the Center for Southwest Research Fellows
Profiles of the New Mexico Historical Review Fellows
Center for Regional Studies Fellowship Award Recipients
This year, CRS provided $127,000 in scholarships to twenty-two graduate students enrolled in various departments and programs. The Ph.D. students received $6,000 and the M.A. students received $5,000. Their research titles are listed below.
Fellows' Names |
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| Stephania Alarcón Alcalá | Economics | Understanding Water Scarcity: Measurement and Valuation in the Middle Rio Grande Basin | ||
| Samuel Asare | Economics | Trends in Consumptive Water Use in the Middle Rio Grande Basin: Evidence from OpenET and Policy Implications | ||
| Cameron Chavez Reed | Earth and Planetary Sciences | Land education in geoscience education to engage students in place-based New Mexico geology curriculum | ||
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| Brisa del Bosque | Spanish and Portuguese | Linguistic Ideologies of University-Educated Immigrant Parents and Their Perceptions of Heritage Spanish in the U.S. Southwest | ||
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| Erin Elder | Geography | A Most Uninteresting River”: seeing the Pecos River anew | ||
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| Howard Griego | Chicana/o Studies | Returning to Querencia: An Autoethnography of Genízaro Homeland | ||
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| Gus Guikema | Geography & Environmental Studies | Infrastructures of Survival: Water, Elk, and Conservation in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico | ||
| Jasmine Hernandez | Evolutionary Anthropology | Restoring Identities: Improving Methods for Identification and Repatriation of Migrants Along the US-Mexico Border | ||
| Lacey Hites | Sociology & Criminology | Discretion By Design: Navigating Advising, Bureaucracy, and Categorical Inequality in a Southwestern Minority Serving Institution | ||
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| Jacqueline Kelley-Cogdell | Geography | Diversifying Oral Histories of Agriculture along the Middle Rio Grande | ||
| Grace Leishman | History | A Choral of Black Women’s Voices’: Margaret Prescod and the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders in South Central Los Angeles, 1980s–2010s | ||
| Kaitlin Lewis | Anthropology | Faith on the Border: Polarization, Politics, and Mainline Protestant Revitalization in the Southern New Mexico Borderlands | ||
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Constanza Mier y Teran Ruesga |
| Economics |
| Health Effects of Toxic Dust from the Shrinking Great Salt Lake |
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Bianca Ruiz-Negrón |
| Sociology |
| Through the Expert’s Lens: Mental Health Professionals and the Psychological Evaluation of Latino/a/x Asylum Seekers |
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| Saif Salih | Community and Regional Planning | The Genizaro Vernacular: The Cultural Landscape of High Mountain | ||
| Sooriyage Salika Dulanjali | Chemistry and Chemical Biology | Peptide-incorporated hydrogels for selective sequestration of radionuclides and heavy metals in aqueous environments to address water quality challenges in New Mexico | ||
| Jane Sawerengera | Economics | Assessing agricultural water users’ willingness to participate in an Environmental Water Leasing Program in the Middle Rio Grande Basin | ||
| Aniket Sharma | Civil, Construction, Environmental Engineering | Assessing Transportation Safety Inequities for Pedestrians and Bicyclists in New Mexico | ||
| Patricia Sotelo Chavira | Biology | Phylogeographic History and Diversification of Sorex monticola Across Sky Island Habitats in the American Southwest | ||
| Angela Stevenson | History | Echoes of the South: The United Daughters of the Confederacy in the U.S. West, 1900-1980 | ||
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| Libby Vigil | Sociology & Criminology | A Comparative Study Between Immigrant Justice and Anti-Carceral Advocacy | ||
| Ziqing Xie | Economics | A Dynamic Bioeconomic Model for Aquaponic Farms | ||
CRS/CSWR Assistantship Recipients
CRS provided $68,500 to the Center for Southwest Research & Special Collections (CSWR) to support three Graduate Student Research Assistant positions during the 2026-2027 academic year.
Fellows' Names |
| Department or |
| CRS/CSWR Assistantship |
Rachel French |
| Geography |
| University Archives Fellowship |
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Joshua Heckman |
| American Studies |
| CSWR Reference and Instruction |
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Maria Feliza Monta Jameson |
| Educational Linguistics |
| Archival Documents Recovery Fellowship |
Rachel will work as a project assistant to digitize glass slides related to the UNM Herbarium. She will create an archival finding aid and prepare it for publication in New Mexico Archives Online. Digitized items will be uploaded and described in the UNM Digital Repository or New Mexico Digital Collections. Her duties will also involve either capturing current student activism related to environmental movements or anti-nuclear protests to be added to the UNM Digital Repository.
Josh is responsible for assisting patrons and researchers in accessing and utilizing CSWR’s unique collections on the U.S. Southwest, Mexico and Latin America, in addition to its Native American collections. This fellowship is rooted in public service and fosters teaching and learning.
Feliza will work on digitizing selected manuscript material from CSWR collections and implementing emerging tools and methodologies, including crowdsourced transcription platforms and Handwritten Text Recognition, to increase accessibility of handwritten materials.
NMHR Assistantship RecipientsCRS provided approximately $91,500 to the New Mexico Historical Review (NMHR) for students to work as editorial assistants for twelve months during FY27. Under the direction of Dr. Durwood Ball, NMHR Director and Editor, the fellows are trained in the essentials of scholarly editing and publishing.
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