Fall 2025 at TBDH: Transborder Scholarship, Mentorship, and Community

ByJessica Corona

As we come to the close of the Fall 2025 semester, we want to take a moment to reflect on and celebrate the collective work, growth, and accomplishments of our community at the Transborder Digital Humanities Center Consortium. This semester has been full of meaningful translingual and transnational conversations, collaboration, mentorship, and scholarly production, and it is important to acknowledge the labor that made all of this possible.

One of our major successes this semester was the completion of Speaker Series II, which featured engaging and insightful conversations with Ph.D. student Alexandra Cenatus, Dr. James Yéku, and Kristen Mapes. These conversations created a vibrant space for transborder and transnational, interdisciplinary dialogue and demonstrated the continued relevance and impact of this series. Recordings and materials from these sessions are available on the Transborder Digital Humanities website under the Speaker Series section (https://transborderdh.org/events/speaker-series/), extending the reach of these conversations beyond the live events. We are excited to carry this momentum forward with our Spring speakers next semester (stay tuned).

We also want to congratulate two new graduate fellows from UTSA, Cristina Ortiz and Subadra Tagle, who completed their first semester as master’s students with TBDH. Their presence and contributions have already strengthened our consortium. At the same time, we proudly celebrate the graduation of our continuing fellows, Elisa Castro and Emily Rodriguez, who completed their M.A. in Spanish at UTSA this fall.

Both Elisa and Emily successfully finalized their dual-hybrid thesis projects, representing significant scholarly and digital contributions to TBDH. Their work will be made available on the TBDH website, further expanding our public-facing research with two digital resources. Graduate Fellow Elisa Castro completed her project, Mapear el mosaico cultural de Viesca, and Graduate Fellow Emily Rodriguez finished her project, Latine Queerstories: Testimonios Orales de Migración. These projects exemplify TBDH’s commitment to transborder research, community-centered knowledge, and bilingual digital humanities praxis.

We also celebrate the professional milestone of our Post-Master’s Fellow, Jessica Corona, who successfully applied to top Ph.D. programs this application cycle, reflecting both individual dedication and the collective mentorship and scholarly environment fostered within TBDH. She also joined the Young Researchers in Digital Humanities Fellowship (RedHD).

This fall also marked the successful completion of the project Fuerza Feminista: Intimate Recovery Memory Archives (FFIRMA). Sylvia Fernández, Brian Rosenblum, and TBDH fellows at UTSA collaborated with scholars, students, and community members from NMSU and Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua throughout the semester to finalize this transborder digital archive, which centers the voices, activism, and memory of families and communities impacted by gender-based violence across the Paso del Norte region. The completion of FFIRMA (the site will be launched in January 2026) represents a major milestone for TBDH, bringing together feminist archival praxis, ethical digital humanities methods, and community-engaged research to preserve collective memory and support ongoing struggles for justice.

This semester, TBDH also continued its commitment to professional development and mentorship. In collaboration with the UTSA Digital Humanities Student Organization (DHSO), we hosted two CV workshop sessions facilitated by Dr. Sylvia Fernández. These sessions provided students with personalized feedback on revised CVs, along with guidance on how to effectively highlight digital humanities projects, community-engaged work, and research accomplishments, making visible the full scope of their intellectual and labor contributions.

This semester also marked an important moment for scholarly production and publication across our consortium. Our fellows, PI, and Co-PIs contributed to major publications:

  • Niloufar Esmaeili, Jessica Corona, and Jasbeth Medrano. (2025). “Border Women Literature and Feminist Cartographies: Student Approaches to Dataset and Visualization Development for Gender-Based Violence Documentation.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sgp2.70025
  • Sylvia Fernández and Cynthia Bejarano. (2025). “Fuerza Feminista: Confronting Intersectional Data Violence by Archiving the Movement Against Antifeminicides in the Paso del Norte Region.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sgp2.70022
  • Sylvia Mendoza & Dolores Delgado Bernal. (2025). “Exploring intersectional feminista oral history methodology: Implications for educational research and praxis.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, pp. 1–19.
  • Eda Özyesilpinar, Laura Gonzales, and Victor J. Del Hierro. Border Mapping: A Participatory Community Design of the Mexico–USA Borderlands. Clemson University Press. Forthcoming February 2026.
    https://libraries.clemson.edu/press/books/border-mapping/
  • Carolina Alonso. Juego peligroso: historias de lucha y diversidad en el futbol femenil mexicano. Peter Lang Group AG, 2024.
    https://www.peterlang.com/document/1396723
  • Stephanie Gonzales, Amezcua, A., Belpoliti, F., Brandl, A., & Meiners, J. (2025). ¡Estamos aquí! Comunidades bilingües e identidades regionales de los Estados Unidos. Volume I. COERLL.
    https://estamosaquishl.org/

Our transborder team was also actively engaged in international scholarly exchange this semester. PI Dra. Sylvia Fernández participated in the IX Seminario Internacional de Estudios Fronterizos at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), Brazil (September 29–October 2, 2025). The panel, “Educating in Border Regions: Knowledge Across Different Scales,” generated a rich discussion on teaching borders across contexts. During this seminar, TBDH formally joined ALEF (the Latin American and Caribbean Association of Border Studies), strengthening our commitment to hemispheric collaboration and transborder pedagogy.

Additionally, our consortium was strongly represented at the Latin American & Caribbean Digital Humanities Symposium (LACDH) 2025, held November 5–7, 2025, and hosted by the University of Florida, the University of North Florida, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras. Three UTSA–TBDH fellows and our PI participated in two panels centering community, memory, and transborder justice through digital humanities research and pedagogy.

As we look ahead, the TBDH team is actively working in collaboration with the LACDH team on planning and co-organizing the 4th Annual Latin American & Caribbean Digital Humanities Symposium (2026), which will be hosted in September 2026 at UTSA under the theme Transfronteras: Third Spaces in Digital Humanities. The call for proposals is now open, and planning continues to move forward as we prepare to welcome scholars, students, and community partners from across the Americas to San Antonio for this important gathering.
https://transborderdh.org/events/conference/

Thank you to each of you who participated in TBDH events this Fall 2025. Your dedication, care, and collaborative spirit were essential to this work. Your time and contributions continue to shape TBDH as a space for thoughtful scholarship, mentorship, and community-building across borders. TBDH is deeply grateful for your involvement and looks forward to seeing you in Spring 2026.

Wishing you happy holidays and a happy New Year!

Abrazos,
Sylvia Fernández and the TBDH Team