Celebrating Excellence: MSU’s Sol Pelaez earns statewide humanities recognition
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State Associate Professor Sol Pelaez is the university’s 2025 Mississippi Humanities Council Teacher of the Year.
This prestigious recognition celebrates Pelaez’s outstanding contributions to scholarship and teaching in the humanities, as well as her significant impact on advancing the humanities mission across the state.
The MHC-sponsored award includes an honorarium and a complimentary ticket to the annual Public Humanities Awards ceremony, where Pelaez will be formally recognized next month in Jackson.
A faculty member in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Pelaez will deliver a public lecture at MSU on her humanities work Tuesday, March 4, 3 p.m. in Mitchell Memorial Library’s John Grisham Room.
Pelaez’s lecture, “The Paradox of Narrating Violence,” will explore the complexities of narrating violence against women, particularly femicide. She will examine the tension between the imperative of telling these stories to challenge silence and the disruption such narratives create in communities.
Drawing on Argentine writer Selva Almada’s book “Chicas Muertas (Dead Girls)” and feminist theory, Pelaez will question patriarchal definitions of womanhood and investigate how femicide is narrated, read and taught.
Pelaez is a faculty affiliate with MSU’s Bobby and Judy Shackouls Honors College and the Gender Studies Program and has a Ph.D. and master’s degree from the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and dual undergraduate degrees from Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina.
Her research spans 20th and 21st century Latin American literature, comparative literature and critical theory. Her current project, “Suspending Latin American Hegemonic Narratives,” explores ethical and political dimensions of narrating violence in literature, analyzing works by authors such as Juan José Saer, Roberto Bolaño, Angélica Gorodischer and Selva Almada.
In addition to her scholarship, Pelaez serves as an external editorial member of “Descentrada: Revista de feminismos y estudios de género,” a publication sponsored by the Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Género of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. She also has represented the College of Arts and Sciences on MSU’s Robert Holland Faculty Senate.
The Mississippi Humanities Council, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, annually recognizes exemplary faculty from Mississippi’s institutions of higher learning who bring the insights of the humanities to public audiences.
For more information about Mississippi State’s College of Arts and Sciences or the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, visit www.cas.msstate.edu or www.cmll.msstate.edu.
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