KINGSTON, R.I. – July 15, 2024 – University of Rhode Island associate professor Kathleen McIntyre, a historian of Latin America and department chair for gender and women’s studies, is heading to Mexico after being named a 2024 U.S. Fulbright-García Robles Social Sciences and Humanities Scholar. McIntyre will use the Fulbright-García Robles grant in Oaxaca during the upcoming academic year, Sept. 1 through May 30, 2025.
McIntyre specializes in religion, indigenous peoples, and gender in modern Latin America, and is the author of Protestantism and State Formation in Post-Revolutionary Oaxaca (2019, University of New Mexico Press). Her current research focuses on women and political activism in Mexico in the first half of the last century, the subject of a talk she delivered at URI in 2020 that was part of that year’s “Long Rhode to the Vote” women’s suffrage centennial series. She also received a National Endowment for the Humanities award for her research that year.
McIntyre will travel to Oaxaca in August for a new study of agrarianism, participatory Indigenismo, and Zapotec radicalism in the region in the 1970s. McIntyre is investigating the relationship between state institutions, agrarian mobilization, and Native rights with particular attention to the role of Zapotec women in the movement spurred by La Coalición Obrera Campesina Estudiantil de Oaxaca (the worker, peasant and student coalition of Oaxaca). McIntyre will also conduct archival research in Oaxaca and serve as guest scholar in residence at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social.
Oaxaca is an area of deep interest for McIntyre and a region where she has been studying and researching for nearly 25 years.
McIntyre is originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, a city with a large Oaxacan population, and because of that became intimately familiar with the hardships agricultural laborers face in the Hudson Valley and the impact of emigration on their homeland, especially regarding Zapotec tequio (communal work) traditions.
As an undergraduate at Vassar College in New York, the Warwick resident majored in Spanish and history and studied human rights and migration in Oaxaca City, while examining the impact migration had on Mexican law and gender roles. As an intern with Rural and Migrant Ministry’s Centro Independiente de Trabajadoras Agrícolas in the region’s onion and dairy farms, she helped support successful legislative campaigns for field sanitation and drinking water in the fields, before going on to pursue her M.A. in Latin American studies and Ph.D. in history at the University of New Mexico.
Now she hopes to put a spotlight on the area and its importance in the history of rural women’s involvement in social movements.
“Historians have increasingly realized the importance of reexamining the 1970s as a watershed moment in social movement history,” McIntyre says. Yet there is little written about women’s participation in activism in 1970s Oaxaca. She hopes to shed light on the roles played by Native peoples and women at the time, focusing on the larger picture of the struggle for Native rights in the Americas.
She will also lecture on transnational women’s suffrage organizing and the history of women’s basketball, topics she teaches about in her URI courses “Give me Suffrage: Voting Rights in the Americas” and “Beauty, Body, Power in the Americas.”
Last year, McIntyre used a Demers Foreign Language Fellowship to boost her already-strong skills as a Spanish speaker and translator. A frequent presenter at Mexican universities and research institutes, McIntyre says the Demers will let her engage in more publishing and collaborations with Latin American scholars and institutions. Her 2019 book was recently published in Spanish by Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca and CUPSA as Protestantismo y Formación del Estado en Oaxaca Después de la Revolución.
McIntyre was selected by the Fulbright scholar program in recognition of her leadership and contributions at URI, including her work as associate director of the Honors Program from 2018–23. The Fulbright program is devoted to increasing understanding between people of the U.S. and other countries. Fulbright U.S. Scholars are faculty, researchers, administrators, and established professionals who teach and conduct research in affiliation with institutes abroad. McIntyre says she is appreciative of the support of her URI colleagues Kathleen Maher and Kristin Johnson for their support of students and faculty who apply for Fulbrights.
Over 800 individuals teach or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program annually. Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the United States government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program, which operates in more than 160 countries worldwide.
College of Business Professor Emeritus Doug Creed, a co-coordinator of last year’s ‘Business for the Common Good’ Honors Colloquium, learned shortly after his retirement in December that he would be returning to Vienna University of Economics and Business as a Fulbright Visiting Professor for spring term 2025. He was previously a Fulbright Visiting Professor at WU Vienna in 2016. This time around he will be teaching a course on social entrepreneurship and conducting research on emerging models of engaged scholarship and faculty efforts to reduce the institutional and career disincentives that impede faculty members from devoting more energy to social impact.
For more information about the Fulbright Program, visit https://fulbrightprogram.org.
McIntyre is available for interviews in English and Spanish.