Chase Selected as Periclean Faculty Leader, Receives Grant for New Course

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Associate Professor of History Michelle Chase, PhD, has been selected as a Periclean Faculty Leader by Project Pericles and has received a $4,500 grant from the organization to create a new humanities course that incorporates a community-initiated project.

Project Pericles is an organization that focuses on voter education and is a longtime partner of Pace University’s Center for Community Action and Research (CCAR) and the Pace Votes program. The course supported by the grant also must incorporate voter education through discussion of relevant civic issues.

With the grant, Chase launched HIS 134: Modern Latin America this spring, a course that satisfies Pace’s civic engagement requirement. Through the course, Chase and her students are partnering with a local nonprofit, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), an organization dedicated to advocating for social justice throughout the Americas, focusing specifically on Latin American migration to the United States, and U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America.

“I am thrilled about this grant because it gives my students an opportunity to explore in a hands-on way what it means to be an active historian and to contemplate ways that scholarship can intersect with community engagement,” said Chase.

Students in the course combine the academic portion—studying recent history of Latin America—with civic engagement, exploring significant events in Latin America through NACLA’s archives. The archives, located in Washington Square, include photos of Fidel Castro speaking at a rally in Cuba, protests in Puerto Rico, agricultural projects in Mexico, and more.

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“The entire class has been able to fully submerge ourselves into the NACLA’s work and try to live through what they were capturing,” said Ana Cristina Armstrong Matta ’26, History. “I’m from Puerto Rico so when I found a few archives that focused solely on my home, it was so special.”

The goal of the course is to curate an online exhibit for NACLA, with students carefully selecting photos to highlight significant events and photographic works.

Chase and Armstrong Matta also presented on the course at an event hosted by CCAR entitled Leading with Civic Engagement: Faculty Info Session on Community-Engaged Work in Civic Engagement Courses on Friday, April 12.

“It is a very eye-opening course when looking at the actions of the U.S. toward Latin American,” said Armstrong Matta. “It’s a really great experience to not just have in class discussions, but to get to see the work and even contribute to NACLA’s mission.”