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Stephanie Rivera Berruz, an assistant professor of philosophy at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship. She is one of 30 junior faculty members across the country selected for the prestigious honor.
The Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, creates career development opportunities for selected faculty fellows with promising research projects. The program provides fellows with a six-month or one-year sabbatical stipend of up to $30,000, as well as a research, travel, or publication stipend, mentoring, and participation in a late summer professional development retreat.
Rivera Berruz, who joined the William Paterson University faculty in 2014, is a specialist in Latin American philosophy, Latina feminism, and the philosophy of race, gender, and sexuality. The Woodrow Wilson Fellowship will support the completion of a book, What Is Latin American Philosophy? She is also completing an invited article on Latin American feminism for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one of the foremost public resources for philosophy globally.
“Ultimately, my identity as a scholar revolves around making philosophy a more diverse space with the hope that when Latinx people or people of color more generally arrive at our discipline they see themselves represented and reflected as part of the field,” she says. Rivera Berruz holds a doctorate in philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is a native of Puerto Rico.
Administered at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation since 2001, the Career Enhancement Fellowship has supported nearly 370 junior faculty members over the past 17 years. The program seeks particularly to increase the presence of junior faculty members who are underrepresented in their fields, as well as other faculty members committed to eradicating racial disparities in core fields in the arts and humanities.
