Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla

Principal Investigator

Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Public and Digital Humanities, Affiliated to the Spanish as a Heritage and English Program and co-founding director of the Community-Engaged Digital Scholarship Hub with the Libraries and Museums and the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of Texas-San Antonio (UTSA COLFA).

Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla (she, her, ella) is a transfronteriza originally from El Paso-Cd. Juárez border region. Her research, teaching, and community engagement lie at the intersection of interdisciplinary studies focused on literature, archives, cross-border cultures and languages, and Latinx communities in the United States. She also explores transnational feminisms and intersections with the use of digital technologies for analyzing, designing, and developing academic and creative digital and public works through ethical and inclusive practices. Over the past decade, she has been a producer and contributing member to numerous multilingual and transnational digital humanities scholarship projects addressing themes of gender and feminist movements, immigration, border cultural heritage and memory.  These include:

  • Delis Negron Digital Archive (2017) at the University of Houston with the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program and the US Latino Digital Humanities Center;
  • Borderlands Archives Cartography (2017) and United Fronteras (2019), independent projects in collaboration with scholars, archivists and activists from Mexico and the United States; Torn Apart/Separados (2018), a collaborative effort among scholars and librarian from different universities in the United States, living with the University of Columbia Libraries;
  • NEH-funded Public Digital Humanities Institute (2022) at the University of Kansas;
  • Mellon-funded Stories for All (2024) project at the University of Kansas;
  • Huellas Incomodas (2020), a collaboration between the University of Kansas and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico, Toluca, funded by Archives Unleashed supported by the Mellon Foundation;
  • Urarina Digital Heritage Project (2021) working with scholars and indigenous communities in Peru;
  • The NEH-funded project, Coming to the Heartland, based at the University of Kansas and engaging with scholars and migrant communities from Latin America and Africa;
  • The NEH-funded Yo soy porque tu eres and the Mellon-funded  All Our Kin Collective  both at Fort Lewis College.

Currently, she is overseeing two transborder digital humanities projects GeoTestimonios Transfronterizos with Chicana border writer Gris Muñoz from El Paso, Texas, and Fuerza Feminista: Intimate Recovery Memory Archives in collaboration with NMSU Regents Professor, Cynthia Bejarano. In relation to this project, Fernández has been awarded a grant from the Mozilla foundation to redesigned  undergraduate and graduate courses like “Border Women Literature and Feminist Cartographies,” “Gender Violence Data and Digital Visualizations,” “Latinas Across Borders in Analog and Digital Archives,” and “Latinx Migrations through Literature, Archives and Digital Humanities”, and is directing student research  in relationship with these projects. Additionally, she has established partnerships with various border activists, writers, artists and cultural promoters and organizations, including The Transborder Art Fund with the Rubin Center at the University of Texas at El Paso,  Casa Amiga, Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres, Centro para el Desarrollo Integral de la Mujer A.C. in Cd. Juarez, Chihuahua, and Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio. These organizations help the TDHC more directly engage with human rights, migration and gender rights efforts that are critical to borderland scholarship. Dr. Fernández brings a focus on local transborder languages, cultures, identities, transnational feminist practices and decolonial-postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy to the Transborder DH Center-Consortium.