Ivonne Wallace Fuentes

Ivonne Wallace Fuentes is the Assistant Director of Professional Development, where she supports faculty in developing their teaching practice, with a special focus on rebuilding reading skills in our attention economy and on reimagining educational practices in the age of generative AI. She also helps support Virginia Tech’s CIRTL programming, including  teaching-related professional development of graduate students and postdoctoral associates.

Prior to joining Virginia Tech, Ivonne was a professor of History at Roanoke College for seventeen years, where she was recognized with the 2023 Dean’s Award for Exemplary Teaching. As a founding member of the Collective for Teaching the History and Culture of the Region of the Americas, which created a repository of Zoom ready content during the COVID pandemic, her innovations in teaching have also been recognized with the 2021 Edwin Leeuwenhoek Teaching Award by the Rocky Mountain Conference on Latin American Studies. As a graduate student, her teaching was recognized with the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by the Duke University Graduate School in 2005. She has served as a Board Member for the American Historical Association and is active in the Conference for Latin American History.

Ivonne is trained as a historian of twentieth century Latin America, and her research interests include revolutionary movements and the role of women and indigenous people in revolutionary movements. Her first book, Most Scandalous Woman: Magda Portal and the Dream of Revolution in Peru, was published in 2017 by the University of Oklahoma Press; her current book project is a narrative of the revolutionary movements that swept Central America in the second half of the twentieth century. She also serves as the Senior Editor for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History.

Ivonne lives in Roanoke with her two teen-aged boys. She earned her B.A. in History and International Studies from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, and her M.A. and her Ph.D. in Latin American History from Duke University. She enjoys traveling, cooking, and listening to entire albums.