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. 

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.

Sarah Dreier Sarah Dreier

Dr. Sarah K. Dreier is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. Her research interests include comparative politics, human rights and state oppression, gender, religion, and integrating qualitative and natural language processing computational methods. She has conducted research in East Africa, Western Europe, and the United States. Her research has been published in outlets including British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Democratization, Harvard Data Science Review, and Washington Post Monkey Cage. She previously worked in public policy research and advocacy in Washington, D.C. 

Matías Fontenla Matías Fontenla

Dr. Matías Fontenla is a Professor of Economics at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on development economics, return migration, and financial intermediation, with a regional interest in Latin America. He has published scholarly articles in journals such as World Development, Economics Letters, and Macroeconomic Dynamics. A native from Argentina, he got his PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin, and taught at CIDE and the University of Guanajuato in Mexico before joining UNM. His research areas include Development Economics, Return Migration, Financial intermediation, and Latin America.

MyrriahGomez Myrriah Gómez

Dr. Myrriah Gómez, prior to joining the Honors College, was an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Mexico – Gallup. Myrriah received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Academies in 2011, which enabled her to return to New Mexico to conduct empirical and archival research for her dissertation.  She has taught courses in History, Chicana/o Studies, Humanities, and English departments across New Mexico and in Texas. She received the UNM Faculty of Color award for Teaching in 2015. Myrriah’s current book project is entitled Nuclear Nuevo México: Identity, Ethnicity, and Resistance in Atomic Third Spaces. She is a proud Nuevomexicana, who is always in search of ways to better the lives of New Mexicans.

Elizabeth Hutchison Elizabeth Hutchison

Dr. Elizabeth Hutchison is Professor of history. Dr. Hutchison's professional trajectory has been deeply shaped by the political and economic context of twentieth-century Latin America, particularly U.S. intervention and the spread of authoritarian regimes. Concerns about social justice, democracy, and human rights have driven her engagement with Chilean history, as well as the study of labor, gender, and sexuality in 20th-century Latin America.  Dr. Hutchison was the lead editor on The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke, 2013), and has recently published Workers Like All the Rest of Them (Duke, 2021), a study of the changing labor relations of domestic service in twentieth-century Chile. 

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.

Richard Wood Richard Wood

Dr. Richard L Wood is a Professor in sociology and is the founding Director of the UNM Southwest Institute on Religion, Culture and Society. He has served as co-editor of Cambridge University Press' book series Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion, and Politics. His book, A Shared Future: Faith-Based Organizing for Racial Equity and Ethical Democracy, analyzes contemporary organizing for racial equity in the United States, particularly within organizations that include white, African-American, Latino, and other diverse participants building shared commitment to racial equality. His research explores religion, social movements, and global/transnational sociology, with a geographic emphasis in areas of Central America, namely Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.