Dr. Alberto Ortiz-Díaz to Serve as Fellow at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center

Thursday, Apr 07, 2022 • MEDIA CONTACT : Contact

Dr. Alberto Ortiz-Díaz to Serve as Fellow at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center

The UTA Department of History is thrilled to congratulate our newest colleague Dr. Alberto Ortiz-Díaz on being named a fellow of the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress! Dr. Ortiz-Díaz will serve the upcoming 2022-2023 academic year in residence at the Library as the recipient of a David B. Larson Fellowship in Health and Spirituality. Established through an endowment from the International Center for the Integration of Health and Spirituality (ICIHS), the fellowship is named in honor of the ICIHS’s late founder, David B. Larson, an epidemiologist and psychiatrist who focused on potentially relevant but understudied factors which might help in prevention, coping, and recovering from illness. The award is designed to continue Dr. Larson’s legacy of promoting meaningful, scholarly study of health and spirituality by encouraging the pursuit of excellence in the scientific study of the relation of religiousness and spirituality to physical, mental, and social health.

In addition to enabling him to complete his first monograph, “Raising the Living Dead: Rehabilitative Corrections in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean” (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press), which showcases the systemic and microlevel entanglement of medicine and belief in island corrections, this signal accomplishment will allow Dr. Ortiz-Díaz to continue research and writing on his second book, tentatively titled “Disputed Medicine: Healers, Healing, and Health Movements in the Dominican Republic and Greater Caribbean,” among several other shorter projects. This prestigious award reflects the caliber of Dr. Ortiz-Díaz’s timely research and is proof positive that he is one of many reasons why UTA’s Department of History is the place #WhereHistoryIsMade.