Eduardo Ledesma, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship. He was named along with Bobby Smith II, Professor of African American studies.

“Congratulations to professors Ledesma and Smith on their selection for these highly competitive, prestigious fellowships,” Chancellor Robert J. Jones said. “It’s gratifying to have their achievements recognized on the national level, and we’re proud to have these exceptional scholars on our campus.”

Ledesma’s project “Visually Impaired Filmmakers and Technologies of Sight” has two key aims, according to the project description: first, to raise critical awareness about the work of blind filmmakers, and second, to establish the contours of a blind cinematic style through theories of the gaze and haptic film. It is the first book to study how visually impaired filmmakers use digital media both to make visible the experience of disability and to destabilize stereotypes about the blind. His analysis of films by blind and visually impaired directors, as well as of collaborations between blind and sighted filmmakers, shows how the aesthetics and content of these works represent the experience of blindness. Ledesma’s work bridges film and disability studies approaches to consider how new technologies of vision are giving blind filmmakers access to the tools and techniques of filmmaking and how their innovations are transforming our experience of film and of visual culture.

Ledesma previously received an NEH 2019 Summer Stipend for the project.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. The NEH promotes excellence in the humanities and accomplishes this mission by awarding grants for top-rated proposals examined by panels of independent, external reviewers.