The University of New Mexico

“MMUF is a network. And I think that over time, the reverberating effects of this network are going to be very, very substantial. As the numbers continue to grow...you begin to get a second- and a third-generation effect...I think that's going to be powerful.”

~ William G. Bowen, co-founder of MMUF and former president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Faculty Mentors

Ana Alonso-Minutti Ana Alonso-Minutti

Dr. Ana Alonso-Minutti is an associate professor in the UNM Department of Music. Her research focuses on late twentieth-century music, and her main interests are avant-garde expressions, interdisciplinary artistic intersections, intellectual elites, and cosmopolitanism. She has taught large undergraduate non-music major courses, upper-division music major courses, courses within the Honors College, and master’s and doctoral-level music history seminars. Alonso-Minutti bases her teaching philosophy and practice on four core values that she aims to instill in her students: passion, inquisitiveness, collaboration, and perseverance. Being born and raised in Mexico, she engages in American academic life by transitioning among different worldviews while establishing fruitful interactions between them.

Laura Elena Belmonte  Laura Elena Belmonte

Dr. Laura Elena Belmonte is an Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies whose research focuses on Chicana and Mexicana feminism, border and transnational studies, and Chicana/o/x spiritual and political activism. Her research is deeply intertwined with her experience as a child of immigrants, living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and experiencing spirituality as a dignifying and decolonial praxis within the Latina/o/x faith community with whom she worships. As a literary and cultural studies scholar, Dr. Belmonte’s work centers the study of the cultural and literary production of Mexicanos, Chicanos, and/or Mexican-Americans and focuses on these cultural expressions in the U.S. and along the U.S.-Mexico Border, thus her work is also transnational. 

Kency Cornejo  Kency Cornejo

Dr. Kency Cornejo is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico where she teaches Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art Histories. She received her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from Duke University, her MA from UT Austin, and her BA from UCLA. She is also a proud first-gen and community college transfer student. Born to Salvadoran immigrant parents and raised in Compton, California, Dr. Cornejo’s experience with Imperialism, institutional racism, and forced migration inform her political and academic endeavors. Her research and pedagogy focus on art of Central America and its US-based diaspora, visual politics and activism in the Americas, and decolonizing methodologies in art and art history.

Shiv Desai Shiv Desai

Dr. Desai is currently working with LOUD (Leaders Organizing 2 Unite & Decriminalize), where he is helping them conduct a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project that examines the school-to-prison pipeline as well as how YPAR can be utilized to inform new policies to shape a more socially just juvenile justice system. His other research interests include centering and privileging youth voices through spoken word poetry, hip hop and other forms of artistic expression. Shiv also recognizes that indigenous forms of knowledge are essential to reclaiming an education that pushes liberation. His research draws upon critical race theory, critical literacy, and decolonizing methodologies.

MyrriahGomez Myrriah Gómez

Dr. Myrriah Gómez, an Associate Professor at the Honors College, is from the Pojoaque Valley in northern New Mexico. She earned her Doctorate in English with an emphasis in Latina/o Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio and is a 2011 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. She is Research Faculty at the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute (SHRI) and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of American Studies at UNM. Her monograph, Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos, examines the effects of settler colonialism and the nuclear industrial complex in New Mexico. Her second book project is an analysis of literature pertaining to nuclear culture written by people of color.

Michael Lechuga Michael Lechuga

Dr. Michael Lechuga researches and teaches Latina/o/x Studies Communication Studies, Rhetoric, Migration and Settler Colonialism Studies, and Affect Studies. He graduated with an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2007 and with a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Denver in 2016. His research explores the ways migrants and migrant communities are subjected in the US by austere migration control structures and white nationalist ideologies. His current research focuses on the role that technology plays in border security assemblages and the ways alienhood is mapped onto migrant bodies through contemporary mechanisms of white-settler governance. 

Ann Murphy Ann V. Murphy

Dr. Ann Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy. Her areas of research are phenomenology and social and political philosophy, particularly theories of violence and nonviolence. Her research focuses on questions of embodiment, vulnerability, and identity. Dr. Murphy the author of Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary (SUNY 2012) and has published essays in various journals including Hypatia, Continental Philosophy Review, Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, and philoSOPHIA. Dr. Murphy teaches classes on ethics, bioethics, political philosophy, philosophy of gender, and contemporary continental thought. 

Catherine Rhodes Catherine Rhodes

Dr. Catherine Rhodes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology focusing in Sociocultural and LInguistic Anthropology. She is an affiliated faculty in the Latin American and Iberian Institute and Educational Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Rhodes holds a joint PhD in Anthropology and Education, and a Graduate Certificate in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She conducts ethnographic research on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge and models of personhood (including ethnic and social identification) and the role language plays in these processes in Yucatan, Mexico. Her work focuses on issues of cultural congruency and accessibility in non-formal learning settings. 

Ian Wallace Ian Wallace

Dr. Ian Wallace is an Assistant Professor of evoluationary anthropologist. His research tackles two big questions: How did humans evolve to use their bodies to move? And what are the costs and benefits of modern physical activity patterns for human health? To address these questions, he studies contemporary people in both the field and lab. He also studies the fossil and archeological records and conducts experiments with animal models. He is particularly drawn to research topics that lie at the interface between evolutionary anthropology and medicine, especially those related to degenerative diseases like osteoarthritis that appear to stem from deleterious interactions between our evolutionary heritage and modern environments. Recently, his fieldwork has been focused on the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Malaysia.