Profiles of 2019-2020 CSWR/SC and DISC Fellows

Valerio Di Fonzo

Valerio Di Fonzo is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Anthropology and a fellow in the Center for Southwest Research. He received a Master in Public Administration from the University of New Mexico in 2014. He also holds a dual Master and Bachelor degree in International Relations and Diplomatic Affairs from the University of Bologna (Italy). His research interests focus on religion; theory and history; capitalism; environmentalism; historical formation of theology; Christianity; U.S. Southwest and Latin America. Currently, he is doing research on environmental conflicts in the Americas and the role that environmental groups, and local and indigenous communities play in those conflicts, with a focus on Catholic advocates for environmental social justice issues.

Daejin Kim

Daejin Kim has been a Scholarly Communication Fellow at Digital Initiative and Scholarly Communication at the UNM Library and supported by the Center for Regional Studies since 2018. He is also a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics, studying Phonetics and Laboratory Phonology. Daejin has been working on various projects, including Searchable Ornithological Research Archives (SORA), Digital Repository, LibVoyant text analysis development, Tony Hillerman archive, Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER), Native American Population dataset, and many other research databases. In Linguistics, his research topics focus on how human speech sound is produced and actively regulated by various factors within and across speakers. One of his current projects is the phonetic and phonological structure of Tohono O'odham language (Uto-Aztecan).

Breanna Reiss

As a PhD Art History student, Breanna Reiss researches pre-Columbian iconography on South American ceramics. Her interests include imagery of flora and fauna and how they relate to ethnobotany, as well as ceramic colorant composition. She completed her MA at UNM in 2018 with a master’s thesis on the mineral composition of Ecuadorian blue and blue-green post-fire colorants found on ceramics in the Maxwell Museum collection. During her CRS/CSWR fellowship, Breanna archived 78,000 film transparencies created and collected by anthropologist Peter T. Furst consisting primarily of images used as teaching materials of pre-Columbian objects and anthropological photos of Indigenous communities around the world. She also archived a Southwest aerial photography collection created by Colonel Hugh Mitchell Jr. and worked on the finding aid and organization of fine art photographer and geologist Wayne Lambert.

Rachel Snow

Rachel Snow holds a doctoral degree in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center with a research specialization in the History of Photography. She is currently a graduate student in the Museum Studies Program at The University of New Mexico. In addition to her numerous publications on photography, she was the visual archivist for artist Judy Chicago. Her work as a Center for Southwest Research Fellow has focused on digitizing and cataloging hundreds of negatives in the Photographic Services Collection. This collection is a little-known part of The University Archive. It was created by UNM photographers working in the office of public relations. The collection covers a myriad of subjects from portraits of UNM employees, campus events and celebrations, to numerous ground and aerial views of a growing and changing campus. It also documents all aspects of university operations from the physical plant to the medical and law schools, and includes images of campus museums and special initiatives. All academic departments are represented in this rich and multifaceted visual history that can be summed up as an institutional self-portrait spanning over fifty years. The digitized images can be found on the New Mexico Digital Collections website by searching UNMA 013.