Victor Goldgel Carballo named a Burkhardt Fellow

​The fellowship will allow him to complete a book examining race in Cuba, other Latin American countries and the United States.

January 30th 2018 | Katie Vaughn
Arts & Humanities, Faculty
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Victor Goldgel Carballo, an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, has received a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars.

The fellowship, awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies, or ACLS, supports scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the important years immediately following the granting of tenure. Goldgel Carballo, whose research and teaching focus on 19th-century Latin American literature, media history, visual culture and race studies, will be provided residence at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina for 2019-2020 academic year and a stipend.

Goldgel Carballo plans to use his time as a fellow to finish his book Passing as Open Secret: Race and Fictions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. “It will be an amazing opportunity to strengthen the comparative and interdisciplinary basis of the project,” he says. 

Goldgel Carballo, who is from Argentina, earned his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the UW-Madison faculty in 2010 and was awarded tenure in 2015, and says being awarded the fellowship is an honor on multiple fronts.

“As an immigrant, it makes me feel welcome,” he says. “As a scholar, it shows me that there is a wider intellectual community who feels the need to support a research project like mine, which tries to understand race by comparing Cuba, other Latin American countries and the United States.”

After learning he’d been named a fellow, Goldgel Carballo sought information about the man after whom the award is named.

“As it turns out, Frederick Burkhardt was not just one of the founders of the ACLS,” he says. “He was also a professor of philosophy at UW in the late 1930s.”