News and Achievements

Xinmin Liu, Associate Professor of Chinese-Pullman, has co-edited with Hua Li the volume Ecocriticism and Speculative Fiction in East Asia. “This volume illustrates Asian speculative fiction’s potential to interrogate and inspire humanity’s ecological and ethical responsibilities, seeking to fill a major lacuna in previous academic literature around ecocriticism in speculative fiction.”

Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in the Vancouver campus, published her second short story. The story is titled “La oscuridad” and appears in the Spring 2026 issue of the refereed journal Label Me Latina/o. The issue and the short story can be accessed at Label Me Latina/o.

Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo, WSU Vancouver, published a review of The Reflective Age: Nostalgia at the End of History (Rutgers University Press, 2025) by Zachary Griffith in The Journal of Popular Culture.

Amy Hernandez Matsumoto, Adjunct Faculty of Spanish, Vancouver campus, organized an interview with author Javier Zamora, best known for his NYT bestselling memoir, Solito (2022).

Mike Hubert has been elected to the Faculty Status Committee (FSC). His three-year term will begin on August 16, 2026. The FSC is a very important committee and very valuable service at university level.

Etna Ávalos, Assistant Professor of Spanish, authored the chapter, “Partes de guerra como contra-archivo afectivo en el contexto de la violencia de género,” which appears in the edited volume En torno a Jorge Volpi: la razón del discurso, el discurso de la razón.

Samuel Ginsburg just published Untouched: Speculative Visions of Quarantine in the Fiction of Maielis González and Brenda Peynado in Caribbean Studies. Quarantine fiction has emerged as an important genre for understanding the physical, emotional, and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Etna Ávalos has published the book Habitar la diferencia: corporalidades disidentes en la literatura latino/americana de Estados Unidos. The book examines how Spanish-language literature produced by immigrant authors in the United States uses the body as a critical lens to interrogate difference.

Seventy-three students at the Showcase for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (SURCA) 2026 were the recipients of 65 awards totaling $14,000.

Three WSU undergraduate students, Nicole Diefenbach, Taylor Page, and Katy Touretsky, have been named recipients of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship.

Three undergraduate Washington State University students traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last month to take part in the Global Model WHO 2025 conference.

Professor Vilma Navarro-Daniels has been appointed as director of the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race within the College of Arts and Sciences, effective Oct. 1.

Publicly Engaged Fellow, Ashley Wells, has piloted “Grace and Grounding: A Dialogue Series on Black Women, Mental Health, and the Church.”

When Weiguo Cao, a career-track associate professor of Chinese at Washington State University, first encountered The Grand Scribe’s Records as a teenager in 1980s China, he had no idea the ancient text would play a major, re-occurring role throughout the course of his life.