Analisa Peña awarded Hulsman Undergraduate Library Research Award’s Emerging Researcher

Congratulations to Analisa Peña, who was selected as the 1st place winner in the 2026 Hulsman Undergraduate Library Research Award’s Emerging Researcher category regarding her work, The Many Faces of Christ: Understanding ‘Trifacial Trinity’ by Gregorio Vasquez Arce y Ceballos. The Jim and Mary Lois Hulsman Undergraduate Library Research Award programs recognize excellence in undergraduate research that incorporates the use of the University Libraries’ resources and demonstrates sophisticated information literacy skills. Student award winners receive a cash prize: $500 for 1st place, $300 for 2nd place, and $200 for 3rd place, along with recognition for their outstanding efforts.

Thanks to the support of our amazing Art History instructor and PhD candidate Beth Norwood, Peña will receive an award in April. Norwood specializes in the art of the ancient Americas, with a particular focus on West Mexico. Norwood’s dissertation, “Narrative Ceramics and Networks of Practice: West Mexican Visual Traditions in the Late Formative-Early Classic Periods,” will focus on the ceramic sculpture from the Late Formative and Early Classic Periods in West Mexico. Her research focuses on the issue of visual communication, and the role West Mexican ceramic sculpture may have played in the expression of important cultural narratives and histories, as well as their use in performance and oral storytelling. By addressing the artistic corpus as an expression of a widely known set of social practices, she frames West Mexico as several communities linked through a network of practice to articulate how this long-lived, widely distributed visual system operated on multiple social and ideological levels.

Congratulations again to Peña for winning this award and thank you to Norwood for her continued support and engagement with her students, specifically in Art History.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
LEARN MORE at https://library.unm.edu/awards/index.php