Former Humanities Professor Arturo Arias Named MacArthur Chair at UC Merced

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA NEWS -- Arias is in his first semester at UC Merced but brings decades of experience and a wealth of honors and accolades to the position. After spending most of the 1980s writing, teaching and conducting research in Mexico, Arias became a professor at San Francisco State University, where he drew acclaim for his fiction writing. Later, at the University of Texas at Austin, he gained more notoriety for his research and scholarly writing, and in 2013 he was named the Tomás Rivera Professor of Spanish Language and Literature. Most recently, Arias has focused his research on the indigenous people of Guatemala and Mexico, and the ways in which they are rising to prominence and gaining political and academic influence in Central American society. By the end of this year, he hopes to publish the first of three books on the subject.