History professor awarded 4-VA Grant

Fawn-Amber Montoya (history) was awarded a 4-VA Spring 2025 Collaborative Research Grant of $24,993 to support her project “Voces: Centering the Latino/x Experience Through Pedagogy and Research.” 4-VA is a partnership among eight Virginia universities that promotes collaborations that leverage the strengths of each partner university and improves efficiencies in higher education across the Commonwealth.  

Montoya’s project brings together scholars at James Madison University and Virginia Commonwealth University to document the experiences, histories, and cultures of Latino/a/x communities in the Commonwealth through Open Educational Resources and digital humanities initiatives. It focuses on “how humanities research on Latino populations can be preserved and shared with broader populations.” 

The grant will expand Montoya’s current work with pedagogical practices for Día De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a Latino and indigenous tradition of honoring ancestors on November 2nd and 3rd. Montoya has collaborated with faculty in Honors, the College of Education, the College of Arts and Letters, and JMU Libraries as well as community partners to establish pedagogical practices that can be incorporated into classes and community events to teach about Latino/a/x history using hands-on and reflective techniques. Discussing the project, Montoya notes: “This thoughtfulness and interdisciplinary collaboration is a model for how we can be better educators, colleagues and professors.”  

Montoya will work with Daniel Morales who leads the Migration Studies Lab at VCU and serves as the lead investigator on the Latino Virginia Project. Morales and VCU students conduct interviews and oral histories with representatives of Latino communities in Virginia and share oral histories, podcasts, photographs, videos, and other resources on their website. The grant will facilitate collaborations between Montoya and Morales to better document Latino/a/x history and culture and share these resources as an open-access digital archive.  

In March 2025, JMU and VCU will co-host a Latinx Digital Humanities symposium in Richmond, Virginia, that brings together experts from Virginia and North Carolina to respond to the two initiatives and envision how educators and scholars might use the resources they make available. Such work exemplifies the 4-VA dedication to putting ideas into action — inviting innovative collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, among Virginia universities, and between educational and business sectors.