Fellows

Rolena Adorno

Areas of interest: Colonial Spanish American literature and history; the nineteenth-century origins of Hispanism in the United States; manuscript culture and textual transmission in colonial Spanish America.

In 2015, Rolena Adorno received the Modern Language Association’s Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement. This award has been presented every three years, starting in 1996; to date, she is the only awardee whose area is Spanish-language literatures. In its citation, the MLA described Adorno as “a premier scholar of colonial Spanish American literary and cultural history, a field that she helped bring out of the shadows starting forty years ago.”

Adorno’s more recent honors include an Honorary Doctorate (Dottorato Honoris Causa) from the University of Rome 1, La Sapienza, awarded in Rome on 15 November 2022. Awarded annually by the university which is one of the oldest in Europe (founded in 1303), Adorno’s honoris causa pertains to her seminal work in Latin American colonial studies, particularly her inclusion, since the late 1970s, of indigenous Amerindian perspectives, which helped spawn the development of the field and its incorporation into the Latin American canon. In 2019 the U.S. Library of Congress appointed Adorno to a four-month fellowship as Chair of the Countries and Cultures of the South, sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center. In 2018 she received the Premio Nacional “Enrique Anderson Imbert” from the Asociación Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. She was named the Phi Beta Kappa-Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program for the academic year 2016-17, during which she gave public lectures and classes at eight different universities nationwide.

Adorno’s prize-winning books include The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (2007), which was awarded the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. Revealing the interdisciplinary breadth of her work, her three-volume study, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez (1999), co-authored with Patrick C. Pautz, received prizes from the American Historical Association, the Western Historical Association, and the New England Council of Latin American Studies.

Designed for specialist and non-specialist audiences alike, her reading of three hundred years of Latin American colonial writing is synthesized in Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2011). With Roberto González Echevarría, she co-authored Breve historia de la literatura latinoamericana colonial y moderna (2017), which consists of their Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions in colonial and modern Latin American literatures, respectively. With Ivan Boserup, she co-authored New Studies of the Autograph Manuscript of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (2003).

Adorno’s other books include De Guancane a Macondo: Estudios de literatura hispanoamericana (2008), Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (1986, 2000); Cronista y príncipe: La obra de don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1989, 1992); and Guaman Poma and his Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru (2001).

Adorno is the co-editor of Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds of Guaman Poma and His Nueva corónica (with Ivan Boserup, 2015); Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (with Kenneth J. Andrien, 1991); The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca (with Patrick C. Pautz, 2003); and the print and digital editions of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (with John V. Murra and Jorge L. Urioste, and Ivan Boserup, respectively). She is the editor of From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period (1985).

Adorno has introduced the most recent English- and Spanish-language editions of Irving A. Leonard’s classic Books of the Brave (University of California Press, 1992) and Los libros del conquistador (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).

In 2003 Rolena Adorno received the Graduate Mentor Award of the Graduate School of Yale University; in 2001, she was honored with a Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Iowa, her alma mater. In 1989-90 she was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow.

Nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2009, Adorno was appointed to membership on the National Council of the Humanities and served until August 2019. She has been an Honorary Associate of the Hispanic Society of America since 1996 and, since 2007, she has held an Honorary Professorship at La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

Adorno is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Faisal Ahmed

Faisal Ahmed has served as a global and national economic policymaker for over two decades. He is currently Deputy Chief in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Institute for Capacity Development and the lead author of the IMF’s global strategy for building institutions and state capacity. Since joining the IMF in 2003, Mr. Ahmed has worked on a broad range of advanced, emerging, and developing economies and served as the Mission Chief for Bhutan and Senior Desk for India. During 2015-2019, Mr. Ahmed served as the Chief Economist of the central bank of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Bank, and Senior Advisor to the Governor. He was appointed as the IMF Resident Representative in Cambodia (2011-15) when Cambodia hosted the ASEAN Chairmanship and the East Asia Summit.

Prior to joining the IMF, Mr. Ahemed worked as an actuary for a global reinsurance company and as an economist at the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. Mr. Ahmed has also taught at the University of Minnesota, the Southeast Asia Central Banks Research and Training Centre (SEACEN), and the Royal School of Administration in Cambodia. Mr. Ahmed has a PhD and an MA in economics from the University of Minnesota, an MFin from Princeton University, and is a CFA Charterholder.

Anne Alstott

Anne Alstott is the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation at Yale Law School. An expert in taxation and social policy, she was named a professor at Yale Law School in 1997 and originally named the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor of Taxation in 2004. She served as deputy dean in 2002 and 2004 and has won the Yale Law Women teaching award three times. From 2008 to 2011, she was the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Prior to coming to Yale, she taught at Columbia Law and before that, served as an attorney-advisor in the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Legislative Counsel. Her books include No Exit: What Parents Owe Children and What Society Owes Parents (Oxford University Press, 2004) and The Stakeholder Society (with Bruce Ackerman, Yale University Press, 1999). She holds an A.B., summa cum laude, in economics from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Jorge Anaya

Jorge Anaya (he/him/his), born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, majored in History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health as a member of the Yale class of 2019. As an undergraduate, Jorge was heavily involved in residential college life and passionate about mentoring local Latinx high school students. Currently, Jorge serves as the Assistant Director of Student Engagement for the Yale College Dean’s Office and coordinates the FGLI Community Initiative, an administrative hub focused on developing resources and programming aimed at enriching a first-generation and/or low-income (FGLI) student’s sense of thriving during their years at Yale.