The Canadian Studies Program is pleased to announce that Luis Amaya Madrid has received our final Edward E. Hildebrand Research Fellowship for Summer 2025.
Luis is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Originally from the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, he is particularly interested in thinking about history of Indigeneity on the Pacific coast of North America. The Pacific coast was naturally the last stop of the extractive project of the colonial nation state in Mexico, Canada and the United States, and his work seeks to uncover archives and connections to think about Indigenous cosmologies and lifeways on the Pacific.
The Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship will support Luis’s investigation of the ways in which Indigenous art, culture, and stories are being brought into larger conversations about history and identity in Pacific Canada. In his fieldwork in British Columbia, Luis will look at the ways in which Indigenous communities interacted and continued to interact with settler groups along the extractive frontier in British Columbia, ending with current political, artistic, and social movements. During his fellowship, he will visit sites and archives in Vancouver and Victoria.
Luis has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and linguistics from the University of Arizona and a master’s in Latin American and Caribbean studies from the University of Guelph in Ontario, where his research focused on the role of storytelling in marginalized communities of Canada, Latin America, and the United States.