Faculty/Student Awards
Stony Brook Graduate Student Awarded TIAA-CREF Ruth Simms Hamilton Fellowship

STONY BROOK, N.Y., February 8, 2006—A Stony Brook University graduate student has been awarded a TIAA-CREF Ruth Simms Hamilton Fellowship to conduct research in his native country of Peru. Luis Martin Gómez, a graduate student in History and an adjunct professor in the Department of Africana Studies will study in Peru for academic year 2006-2007. His advisor is Professor Brooke Larson, Department of History.

Luis Gomez

Gómez was born in Lima and studied Humanities at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru, where he obtained a B.A. in Humanities before coming to Stony Brook. His fellowship will be spent studying the transformation of black culture in Lima from the 1920s to the 1970s and how the cultural experiences of black workers there was transformed and become part of the broader national cultural experiences in the country. The fellowship is for one year.

The TIAA-CREF Ruth Simms Hamilton Research Fellowship was established to honor the memory and outstanding work of Dr. Ruth Simms Hamilton, the former Michigan State University Professor and TIAA Trustee. Professor Hamilton was a TIAA Trustee from 1989 to 2003 and during her 35-year career at Michigan State University; she was a highly regarded sociology professor and a faculty member of the African Studies Center, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Center for Advanced Study of International Development. She was an early pioneer of research concerning the African Diaspora - the study of the dispersion and settlement of African peoples once they left the African continent.

The fellowship is funded by TIAA-CREF and will be administered by the TIAA-CREF Institute. The fellowship is awarded to graduate students enrolled in a social science field relating to the African Diaspora at an accredited U.S. college or university and recognizes cutting-edge, graduate-level research which furthers the study of the African Diaspora.

© Copyright 2012 by Stony Brook University