A humanities professor at the University of Iowa has won an early-career fellowship to work on a book about incarceration in the modern Caribbean.

Alberto Ortiz Diaz, assistant professor of history and global health studies, is one of 24 scholars to be named a 2020-21 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Ford fellowships are administered by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and seek to increase diversity in the academy and maximize the educational benefits of diversity. 

Ortiz Diaz will work on his book manuscript, Raising the Living Dead: Rehabilitative Corrections in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, and several other projects. He is spending the academic year at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras’ Institute of Caribbean Studies, researching and writing the book.

“This is a very competitive national fellowship,” Ortiz Díaz says. “To earn something like this at any level is a tremendous honor.”