PHI research associates bring an impressive breadth and depth of academic training and public humanities experience to our current research and outreach initiatives.
Director
Christine Garst-Santos
Director and Associate Professor of Spanish
School of American and Global Studies
College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Christine Garst-Santos, director of the Public Humanities Initiative (PHI) and Associate Professor of Spanish, works with the state’s newcomer neighbors and Indigenous communities through a series of outreach projects focused on ESL classes, legal advocacy and support, translation projects, workforce development, Lakota language revitalization efforts and diversity and intercultural competence workshops. A Cervantes specialist by training, her teaching and research explore how literature negotiates questions of gender, race, ethnicity and religion to both contest and create national identities and narratives. Convinced that the humanities can address the current “state of emergency” in which we live, her recent work has shifted to public-facing humanities projects and the development of the SDSU PHI | Public Humanities Initiative.
Current PHI projects: Citizenship, Community and Belonging in South Dakota and Welcoming New Americans
Research Associates
José Álvarez, associate professor of Spanish and global studies, specializes in contemporary Latin American literature and culture and inter-American studies. His research focuses on the intersection between literary, journalistic, scientific and philosophical discourses and their role in the construction of individual and collective identities.
Current PHI project: Welcoming New Americans
Dr. Molly Krueger Enz is Distinguished Professor of French and Global Studies. Her research is interdisciplinary and weaves together several areas of inquiry: Francophone literature and cinema from West Africa and the Caribbean, gender studies, and postcolonial studies. From 2020-2022, she served as Co-Principal Investigator on a Community Innovation grant project funded by the Bush Foundation called the Brookings Inclusive Collaborative. Dr. Enz is a qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), has designed and taught courses on intercultural competence at SDSU, and has been invited to deliver workshops on developing intercultural competence by groups in the Brookings community and professional organizations in the state of South Dakota.
Current PHI project: Welcoming New Americans