Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN
For Immediate Release
Barbara Roche Rico, professor and chair of English at Loyola Marymount University, has been elected to a second four-year term on the National Board of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts.
Rico, who holds a doctorate from Yale University, has taught at LMU since 1989. Her research interests include comparative studies of Renaissance authors and, more recently, work on Nicholasa Mohr, Judith Ortíz Cofer, Esmeralda Santiago and other writers of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. The textbook she co-edited with Sandra Mano of UCLA, “American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context” (Houghton Mifflin), was published in three editions. Other publications of hers include essays in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Girlhood Studies. She has presented her work at conferences in the United States, including Puerto Rico, and in Mexico, and Italy. Transatlantic exchange is a focus of her research and teaching, which have been supported by internal and external grants. In terms of academic service, she has directed several programs, including the Catholic Studies Program, through which she helped to establish student engagement courses in Italy and in Peru. In 2012, she was one of four colleagues selected for the first cohort of the LMU Senior Vice Presidents’ Fellows Leadership Program. She has recently been named to Academic Affairs Sub-committee of the LMU Board of Trustees.
The Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, founded in 1991, seeks to strengthen the quality and shape the character of church-related institutions of learning through three programmatic initiatives: postdoctoral teaching fellowships for young scholars who wish to renew their sense of vocation within a Christian community of learning; support of young men and women of exceptional academic talent who are exploring vocations in church-related higher education; and maintaining a collaborative Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities that sponsors a variety of activities and publications designed to explore the Christian character of the academic vocation and to strengthen the religious nature of church-related institutions. The Lilly Network represents among its current membership of 101 schools a diversity of denominational traditions, institutional types, and geographical locations. Loyola Marymount University is a founding member of the Lilly Network. The program is based at Christ College, the interdisciplinary honors college of Valparaiso University in Indiana.
