President Barack Obama has appointed Rolena Adorno, the Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Yale University, to membership on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The Council reviews grant applications and advises the chair of the NEH. The President nominated Adorno on July 9, 2009, and her appointment was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on November 5, 2009. Adorno is a scholar of Colonial Spanish-American literature and the 19th-century origins of Hispanism in the United States. Winner of several book prizes, Adorno was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize from the Modern Language Association for The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (2007). An honorary professor of La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima, Adorno is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.