If you are a UCI affiliate (faculty or graduate student) interested in reserving the Dr. Fitzsimmons Conference Room, please contact us at hum-glc@uci.edu.
Learn More about Dr. Fitzsimmons:
Dr. Maureen A. J. Fitzsimmons received her PhD in English from UC Irvine in 2021. Prior to that, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and also her Master of Arts in English from Loyola Marymount University. Her scholarly interests included composition historiographies and pedagogies, in all their manifestations, with special attention to Jesuit pedagogy. She was a Fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in the Humanities and the Arts, in addition to being a UC Irvine Regents' Fellow, and served as Vice Chair of the Jesuit Conference on Rhetoric and Composition. She earned her PhD by completing a dissertation, Raciolinguistic Ideologies in the Rhetoric of Early California Statehood, which was a study of various historical documents to trace how Spanish became a racialized language–that is, associated with racialized populations and thus arbitrarily conceptualized as an inferior language–in the mid-19th century in the early years surrounding the establishment of the State of California. The dissertation demonstrates not only Dr. Fitzsimmons’s abilities as a scholar but also and her unwavering commitment to social justice on behalf of her students. Dr. Fitzsimmons fulfilled a lifelong dream by earning her doctorate but unexpectedly passed away just over a year later following a brief but courageous battle with cancer.