Foundation Scholar Zachary Gilpin’s keen interest in the history and geography of Latin America led him into an undergraduate career filled with a variety of studies.
Gilpin worked towards a major in history with minors in Spanish, Latin American Studies, and foreign culture and literature in translation. His interested covered the history and geography of Latin American, including the history of gender, sexuality and Indigenous peoples in the region.
“I fell in love with geography; I realized geography's complementariness to history, the role that both time and space play as fundamental vectors of social, economic, cultural, and environmental change.”
One of Gilpin’s favorite opportunities at WVU was his ability to develop multiple independent studies on his focus areas. Over the last four years, he completed a literature review of contemporary scholarship in Maya/Indigenous studies in Spanish for Dr. Pablo Garcia, an independent study of contemporary Argentine literature with Dr. Tuninetti and he’s currently working on a year-long study for his capstone on the Inquisition of New Spain with Dr. Michele Stephens.
For Gilpin, the Foundation Scholarship was not only a source of pride and accomplishment, but a way for him to expand his range of knowledge in ways he’d never done before.
“The Foundation Scholarship has enabled a level of flexibility that has allowed me to explore multiple social scientific and humanistic interests,” Gilpin said.
After graduation, Gilpin will be staying at WVU to pursue a master’s degree in geography. He hopes to explore the historical and current political contestations of the United States-Mexico border and the construction, regulation and representation of the border region’s political economy and ecology.