Dr. Angel David Nieves, assistant professor in the Historic Preservation Program in the School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation and Director of Graduate Research and Training in the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity was recently named the recipient of the 2007 Lionel Cantu Memorial Colloquium Award from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
On Friday, May 18th, he delivered the 2007 Memorial Lecture in honor of Dr. Cantu's commitment to studies of transnational migration, cross-border studies and the interrelations between race, gender and sexuality in the nation-state. Replete with the distinction and an honorarium, he was honored at a commemorative banquet with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty, students and administration.
Dr. Nieves presented his digital research project on the Hector Pieterson Museum, a national heritage site in Johannesburg, South Africa. A faculty research fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), he has developed a "living archive" and digital museum entitled "Soweto '76" memorializing the 1976 Soweto uprising against apartheid resulting in the massacre of over 575 student protesters. He is the first MITH faculty fellow from the School of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation.
"I am honored to give this year's memorial lecture," said Dr. Nieves. "Lionel made a lasting and significant imprint on the field, his students and colleagues. I hope that my talk furthers his vision of social justice and equity in some important ways."
Lionel Cantu was assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the time of his unexpected death. He was 36. Established in 2003, the Cantu Memorial Colloquium honors one graduate student and faculty member pursuing studies related to his research. His co-edited anthology with Eithne Luibheid, Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings was posthumously published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2005.
Nieves is also traveling to Uganda, Rwanda, and South Africa in June as part of an ACC/IAC Faculty Fellowship he was awarded. The program, "Post-Conflict Reconciliation and Reconstruction in Africa," will provide an opportunity to explore and possibly establish additional collaborations with historic sites in Uganda and Rwanda. He hopes to add two additional sites to his current project under the umbrella of a larger meta site on issues of national reconciliation.