Henken, Ted
Department of Black and Hispanic Studies, Baruch College
Professor Ted Henken holds a Doctorate from Tulane University’s Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies with a dual appointment in the Department Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York.
A past winner of Baruch College’s Presidential Excellence Award in Distinguished Teaching (2007), Henken specializes in courses on contemporary Cuban culture and society, sociology of the Internet, contemporary Latin America, Latinos in the U.S., racism and ethnic relations, the sociology of religion, international migration, and comparative urban studies courses on Havana, New York, and New Orleans.
Anderson, Judith
Department of Ethnic and Race Studies at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College
Judith Anderson is a cultural anthropologist, Afro-Latin Americanist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic and Race Studies at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College where she teaches classes in the areas of anthropology, Latin American Studies, and Black Studies. Her research focuses on Black political organizing in Argentina, Latin America’s famed “European” nation. She is the cofounder and lead consultant of Organización Afrodescendiente para la Asistencia Jurídica y Formación (OAFRO), Argentina’s first Black legal aid organization. She was a member in CUNY’s Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI) Planning Commission and is a member of the Race, Equity, and Inclusion (REI) Steering Committee at BMCC. She serves as the institutional liaison for BMCC under the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Title VI grant focused on curriculum development. Prof. Anderson is a creator and program director for Black Studies across the Americas at BMCC, a research initiative in which faculty and students work collaboratively to insert Black Studies into courses where it is not the focus.
Mathews-Salazar, Patricia
Department of Ethnic and Race Studies at BMCC
Patricia Mathews-Salazar is professor of anthropology and chair of the department of Ethnic and Race Studies at BMCC. Her research has focused on the anthropology of law in the Peruvian Andes and on the development of political identities among indigenous women in both rural Tucumán, northwest Argentina, and outskirts of the city Cuzco, Perú. Professor Mathews has taught a variety of courses in the Anthropology of Latin America, women’s studies, and human geography at BMCC. She is a member of the doctoral faculty at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Professor Mathews is involved in various initiatives on faculty and curriculum development addressing issues of Equity and Inclusion in the college and university.
Aja, Alan A.
Department: Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College
Alan A. Aja is professor and chair in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College (CUNY). His research interests include stratification economics, racial wealth inequities, economic democracy, collective action, unionization and sustainability. His publications include the recent book Afro-Latinos in the U.S. Economy with Michelle Holder (Lexington Books, 2021) and Miami’s Forgotten Cubans: Race, Racialization and Local Afro-Cuban Experience (Palgrave-McMillan, 2016). He has independent and collaborative pieces in the Washington Post, Boston Review, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Education Week, the Nation, Dissent, the American Prospect, Latino Rebels and other outlets. Aja is a scholar-activist for federal to municipal level job guarantees. He advised on the award-winning documentary “The Sentence” by Rudy Valdez. Before academia, Aja worked as a labor organizer in Texas. He is currently on the Board of Directors for the National Jobs for All Network.
Ebert, Christopher C.
Department of History, Brooklyn College
Christopher Ebert, a California native, received his undergraduate degree from San Francisco State University, a school that has much in common with Brooklyn College.
Pérez González, María
Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College
María E. Pérez y González was awarded a NIMH Fellowship at the Hispanic Research Center of Fordham University. She published articles based on her groundbreaking research “Latinas in Ministry: A Pioneering Study on Women Ministers, Educators and Students of Theology” (New York City Mission Society 1992), serving as Founding Director of the Latinas in Ministry Program. She was Co-Investigator of the National Survey of Leadership in Latino Parishes and Congregations, Center for Religion in Society and Culture/Program for the Analysis of Religion Among Latinos. Author of Puerto Ricans in the US (Greenwood Press 2000). She is an Associate Professor, former Chair of the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies (PRLS) (2004-2019), Acting Chair of PRLS (Fall 2001; 2002-03; Spring 2020), Director of the Center for Latino Studies (2004-2019), and the first Chair of Faculty Council of Latinx heritage (2009-2012). Co-Host/Co-Organizer of the PRLS West Side Story: The Brooklyn Connection Lecture Series in Fall 2021 featuring Virginia Sánchez Korrol, Bobby Sanabria, Tony Kushner, Ernesto Acevedo Muñoz, Juan González, Jeanine Tesori, and Steven Spielberg. Leading Co-Editor with Virginia Sánchez Korrol of Puerto Rican Studies in CUNY: The First 50 Years (Centro Press 2021).
Santamaría, Carla
Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College
Carla Santamaria explores ways in which Puerto Rican urban music represents the challenges, forms of resistance, and contradictions that frame Caribbean societies. Some of her work focuses on links between erotism, colonialism, and Hispanic-Caribbean identity. Along with this, she has also studied how different cultural manifestations created by the Puerto Rican diaspora helped transform much of the music, poetry, and literature developed on the archipelago throughout the greater part of the XXth and XXIst centuries. Her current research explores ways in which Caribbean popular culture, more particularly urban music, can be used as a tool to innovate bilingual education and to create a curriculum based on cultural wealth. Her next project will focus on a comparative study among Latinx and Arab-American students and how their experience compares with respect to their struggles as colonial subjects in a Eurocentric context.
Ungar, Mark
Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College
Mark Ungar is Professor of Political Science and Criminal Justice, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Publications include five books and over 40 articles and publications. Currently, he is an advisor on security reform at the United Nations; directing a project for USAID on extortion in Central America; is on the leadership council of the International Network of Environmental Compliance and Enforcement (INECE); is working with the opposition in Nicaragua and Venezuela on police reform; and is directing a study for the Inter-American Development Bank on environmental crime in Latin America.
Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline
Department of Political Science, City College; Director, The Masters Program in International Relations, City College; Ph.D. Program in Political Science, Graduate Center
Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1979. She is a specialist in foreign policy with an area studies focus on the Caribbean small states, Caribbean-Latin American, and Caribbean-Asian relations. Her books include: Caribbean Public Policy: Regional, Cultural and Socioeconomic Issues for the 21st Century (co-editor with Dennis Gayle; Boulder, CO: Westview 1997); The Caribbean in the Pacific Century (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1993, with W. Marvin Will, Dennis G. Gayle, and I. Griffith); The Caribbean in World Affairs: The Foreign Policies of the English-Speaking Caribbean (Westview Press, 1989) which is currently being thoroughly revised and will be published by the same press in 2001 as The Caribbean in International Affairs: The Foreign Policies of CARICOM Nations; Interpreting the Third World: Politics, Economics and Social Issues (New York: CBS/Praeger, 1986); and The Venezuela-Guyana Border Dispute: A Study in Conflict Resolution (Westview 1984). In addition, a small volume of essays was published by the Caribbean Research Center as Caribbean Diplomacy (1995). She is currently editing a volume entitled Re-Conceptualizing Global South Foreign Policy to be published by Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Prof. Braveboy-Wagner has served as President and Vice-President of the Caribbean Studies Association, the leading international association of scholars devoted to the study of the broader Caribbean, and has twice been honored for her work on the Caribbean. For many years, she has also served as the United Nations-NGO representative of the International Studies Association, and as such sits on the ISA’s Governing Council. She has published numerous articles and analytical pieces in books and journals and has presented some 60 papers at national and international conferences and workshops. She has also served as a consultant on various United Nations, United States, Caribbean, and Latin American government projects, and has received several grants within and outside CUNY.
Carlson, Jerry W.
Department of Media & Communication Arts, City College; senior producer for City University Television in New York City
Jerry W. Carlson is an assistant professor in the Department of Media & communication Arts of the City College (CUNY) and senior producer for City University Television in New York City. A specialist in narrative theory, global and American independent film, and the cinemas of the Spanish and French speaking peoples, he was the Guest Editor of an issue of Review: Latin American Literature & Arts dedicated to cinema. He is the producer of Charlando con Cervantes, a television series offering interviews with leading Latin American & Caribbean writers, artists, & filmmakers. In addition, he has curated retrospectives of Cuban, Mexican, Colombian, Argentine, and Venezuelan films, among others, for his regular television series City Cinematheque. Among his recent publications are an interview with Guatemalan filmmaker Luis Argueta and an essay about the responses of Caribbean cinema to modernization. He is currently researching a book to be titled Migrating Spirits: Cinemas of the Tropical Atlantic that investigates how films from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States represent the social formations created by the plantation system and its aftermath. He has conducted research and lectured extensively in Latin America and the Caribbean. Educated at Williams College (B.A.) and the University of Chicago (A.M. & Ph.D.), he was inducted in 1997 by the French government as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques. He is a partner in Cobblestone Films, an independent film and video company.
Haslip-Viera, Gabriel
Department of Sociology and Director of the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies, City College
Gabriel Haslip-Viera is currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies at the City College of New York. He was chairperson of the former Department of Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at the City College from 1985 to 1991, and was director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College from September 1997 to January 2000. A specialist in the history of pre-columbian and colonial Mexico and the history of Latino communities in New York City, Dr. Haslip-Viera has lectured extensively on these subjects, and on the relationship between invented racial identities and pseudo-scholarship. His recent publications include Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692-1810 (University of New Mexico Press, 1999); the anthology Taino Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics (Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 1999), the co-edited volume Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), and the co authored journal articles “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs,” Current Anthropology, June 1997, and “They Were NOT Here Before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s,” Ethnohistory, Spring 1997.
Hernández, Ramona
Department: Sociology, Director, Dominican Studies Institute, City College
Ramona Hernández is the Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY DSI) and a Professor of Sociology, both at the City College of New York. She is also on the faculty at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests include the mobility of workers from Latin America and the Caribbean, the socioeconomic conditions of Dominicans in the U.S., and the restructuring of the world economy and its effects on working-class people. Under her leadership, CUNY DSI—which is home to a research unit, Dominican Library, and Dominican Archives—has distinguished itself as a world-class institute of research known for its groundbreaking scholarship on the history of the Dominican people in the United States and elsewhere. Among CUNY DSI’s most recent contributions are the discovery of the Dominican Juan Rodriguez, the first immigrant to have settled in New York City in 1613, and Esteban Hotesse, the only Dominican-born member of the Tuskegee Airmen. Hotesse is one of over 300 World War II Dominican veterans whose stories have been collected and documented by CUNY DSI in the ongoing Fighting for Democracy: Dominican Veterans from World War II project, which launched in 2015.The Institute is also the creator of the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool, the only interactive online platform in the world devoted to teaching the deciphering and reading of the handwriting styles of manuscripts from the early-modern Spanish-language world. In 2020, CUNY DSI again made waves in the world of public humanities with the release of the National Institute for the Humanities-funded project, A History of Dominican Music in the United States, the first open-source digital tool narrating the history of Dominican music as it developed during the past century in the U.S. In 2021, in continuation of years of research on the First Blacks in the Americas and in commemoration of the first rebellion of enslaved Black Africans in the Americas, which took place in La Española (today the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti) in 1521, CUNY DSI undertook the first Archeological Survey in the Dominican Republic aimed at locating the site of the sugar mill where this transcendental event took place 500 years ago.
López, Iris
Department of Sociology, City College
Iris López is Professor of Sociology and currently co-Director of the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies at City College. An invited speaker, consultant and board member, Professor López completed her Bachelors degree at New York University in literature in 1975, and earned her Masters and Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia University in 1980 and 1985. She is a specialist in Latino/a gender and educational issues, pre-natal care, and sterilization abuse.
Rénique, Gerardo
Department of History, City College
Gerardo Rénique is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the City College of the City University of New York. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Agraria, Lima, Peru where he obtained a B.S. in agronomy. He received a M.A. and a Ph.D in history from Columbia University in 1983 and 1990 respectively.
Professor Rénique’s research has focused on the modern and contemporary history of Peru and Mexico. His book Peru Time of Fear (Latin America Bureau: London, 1992) [co-authored] examines the political and social history of the Andean country from the 1960s to the 1990s. His current research on Peru examines the nature of Fujimori’s state formation and the political and cultural dynamics of the popular and antisystemic movements and political organizations that fueled the resistance and mobilization responsible for its recent fall. The main ideas and hypothesis guiding this research are presented in the recently published Popular Movements, the Legacy of the Left, and the Fall of Fujimori in Socialism and Democracy, # 28 (vol. 14, n.2, Fall/Winter, 2000).His other of research concentrates of the Mexican border state of Sonora. Professor Rénique’s unpublished dissertation examines Sonora’s economic and social history between the 1850s and the advent of the 1910 revolution. At the moment he is completing a manuscript, provisionally titled Race, Region and Nation. Sonora’s Anti-Chinese Movement in the Formation of México’s Nation-State, on the relatively unknown anti-Chinese movement that during the 1920s and 1930s spread from the state of Sonora into the rest of the country. This book focuses on the relationship between this movement to the racial understandings and nationalist projects of the Sonoran revolutionary fraction that laid the foundations of México’s national state, governing party, cultural institutions and nationalist ideology during the 1920s and 1930s. Parts of this manuscript have been recently published as Anti-Chinese Racism, Nationalism and State Formation in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 14, 89-137, 2001; and as “Race, Region and Nation. Sonora’s Anti-Chinese Racism and México’s Post-Revolutionary Nationalism,” in Nancy Applebaum, Anne MacPherson, and Karin Alexandra (eds.) Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming).
Riobó, Carlos
Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, City College
Carlos Riobó is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures at The Graduate Center and at The City College of New York. He was Distinguished Scholar in CUNY’s Advanced Research Collaborative in 2021. He is also Professor of Comparative Literature at CCNY, the former Chair of his Department of Classical and Modern Languages & Literatures (2012-2019), and the current Chair of the Humanities and Arts Divisional Council (CLAS). Professor Riobó is the Director of CCNY’s Kaye Scholarship and the Director of its Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. He is an Editorial Board member of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.
Dr. Riobó was the recipient of the CCNY President’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Service in the Division of Humanities and Arts in 2014. His research interests include nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century Cuban and Argentine literature and cultures. He has appeared on U.S. and international radio and television programs. Professor Riobó has done field research in Havana at the Cuban National Library and Archive, as well as in Argentina, Dominican Republic, France, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain, and the UK. He has published articles on Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Sigüenza y Góngora, nineteenth-century Argentine literature, Ezra Pound, and Italian and Spanish Medieval Literature, in major refereed journals. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript on the counter archive. He has taught at Yale University, SUNY Binghamton, Bard College, and Columbia University. In 2017, he was chosen as recipient of an Erasmus+ Staff Mobility Program and invited to teach at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy.
In 2019, he won Best Presentation Award for his talk at the International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities in Paris, France. His selected publications include the books La Evolución del español. Co-authored with Burunat and Estévez. Peter Lang. Forthcoming, 2023; Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa, co-edited with Distinguished Professor Raquel Chang-Rodríguez (University of Nebraska Press, 2020); La Sintaxis del Español. Co-authored with Burunat and Estévez. Peter Lang., 2020; La Estructura del Español. Co-authored with Burunat and Estévez. Peter Lang., 2019; Caught between the Lines: Captives, Frontiers, and National Identity in Argentine Literature and Art (University of Nebraska Press, New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies series, 2019); Sub-versions of the Archive: Manuel Puig’s and Severo Sarduy’s Alternative Identities (Bucknell University Press, 2011); Cuban Intersection of Literary and Urban Spaces (SUNY Press, 2011); Handbook of Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Politics, Civil Society, and Globalization, with Mauricio Font (Paradigm Press, 2013); and, among his many peer-reviewed article are, “Raiding the Anales of the Empire: Sarduy’s Subversions of the Latin American Boom,” Hispanic Review. 81.3 (2013): 331-352, for which he won in 2014 the Latin American Studies Association’s (LASA) Sylvia Molloy Award for the best peer-reviewed humanities article published in 2013 and “Sarduy’s Colibrí and the Search for Discursive Foundations in the Regional Novel” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 41.2 (2017): 54-68. He was awarded participation in CCNY’s Rifkind Seminar for 2019-2020, on the Archive.
Silber, Irina Carlota
Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber received her PhD from New York University and is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Gender Studies, and International Studies at the Colin Powell School, CCNY. She is also on the Doctoral Faculty in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Silber is the recipient of various fellowships including a Fulbright-Hays, Interamerican Foundation Fellowship, Charlotte Newcombe, Rockefeller Fellowship, a Fulbright Specialist Award, and a CUNY Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship. She is the author of the award-winning book Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (Rutgers 2011), which was subsequently published in Spanish with UCA Editores in El Salvador (2018). Her work has been published in journals such as Gender & History, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Anthropology & Humanism, and The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Silber remains committed to pursuing various ethnographic genres and received a First Prize in Poetry from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology (2012).
Silber is committed to public scholarship and most recently provided an expert anthropological dictamen for the El Mozote Massacre case currently underway in El Salvador.
Ungar, Mark
Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College
Mark Ungar is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is author of Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America (Lynne Rienner, 2002), co-editor of Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox (Routledge, 2001) and several articles and book chapters on constitutionalism, crime, and related issues. Currently, he is writing on a book on police reform, and is working with human rights groups in Venezuela and Peru to organize national dialogues on the next stage of judicial reform.
Valdés, Vanessa K.
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, City College
García Colón, Ismael
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, College of Staten Island
Ismael García Colón is Professor of Anthropology at the College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is a historical and political anthropologist with interests in political economy, oral history, migration, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, farm labor, citizenship, and U.S ethnic and racial histories. His research experiences include documenting Latinxs in the NYC labor movement, and conducting ethnographic research on landless workers, migrant farmworkers, colonial state formation, and land distribution programs in Puerto Rico. García Colón is the author of Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on US Farms (University of California Press, 2020), winner of the 2020 Frank Bonilla Book Award from the Puerto Rican Studies Association, and Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State (University Press of Florida, 2009). García Colón’s research explores the Puerto Rican experience in U.S. farm labor and its relation to U.S. colonialism and immigration policies, and how government policies and workers formed and transformed modern subjectivities in Puerto Rico.
Marcus-Delgado, Jane
Department of Spanish and International Studies, College of Staten Island
Jane Marcus-Delgado is Assistant Professor of Spanish and International Studies at the College of Staten Island. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in International Relations from the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University (1989, 1999), and her B.A. degree in Romance Languages and English Literature from the University of Chicago (1983). Her research interests include presidential legitimacy and the politics of economic reform concentrating primarily on Argentina and Peru. She currently studies the political consequences of radical neoliberal reform programs, focusing on corruption and other challenges to democracy.
She has been an affiliated researcher with the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in Lima, as well as an election observer with the Organization of American States in Nicaragua and Transparencia in Peru. Prior to joining the CSI faculty, Professor Marcus-Delgado was an associate at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. She was previously an officer of the Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities (LASPAU) where she worked with the Fulbright Program in Central America (1991-1994), and an administrator of the Nuevo Instituto de CentroAmérica in Estelí, Nicargua (1988-1990).
Arenal, Electa
Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures, Graduate Center
Electa Arenal, Latinamericanist, professor of Hispanic literatures, and translator, is one of the pioneers of Women’s Studies and a leading Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz scholar. A member of the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures, the Master in Liberal Studies, and the Women’s Studies Certificate Program of City University of New York [CUNY]/Graduate Center, she also taught, 1968-97, at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. A specialist in colonial literature and women’s monastic culture, she is co-author of three books in the field: Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works; Cultura conventual femenina. Obras completas de sor Marcela de San Félix, la hija de Lope de Vega [Women’s Convent Culture: Complete Works of S.M.S.F., daughter of L.de V.]; and the bilingual, annotated edition of Sor Juana Inés de Cruz, The Answer/La Respuesta, including a Selection of Poems. She has published essays on Sor Juana and other monastic women, and on the work of twentieth century Central American writers Claribel Alegría, Gioconda Belli, and Carmen Naranjo.
Professor Arenal helped found women’s studies at Richmond College (now the College of Staten Island) CUNY in the early 1970’s. From 1992-94 she was Director of Research at the Center for Feminist Research in the Humanities at the University of Bergen, Norway, and from 1997-2000, Director, Center for the Study of Women and Society and Coordinator, Women’s Studies Certificate Program at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
An NEH and Bunting Institute Fellow, 1989-90 she has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation’s US-Mexico Cultural Fund, and from the PSC-CUNY Faculty Award Program for her current project, a book and interactive on-line program, Sor Juana’s Arch/El arco de Sor Juana.
Besse, Susan
Department of History, City College; Ph.D. Program in History, Graduate Center
Susan Besse (Yale University, Ph.D., 1983) is an Associate Professor of History at the City College and Graduate Center. Her areas of specialization are modern Brazil and the history of women/gender and nation-building. She has published a book entitled Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which has been translated into Portuguese and published by the Editora da Universidad de Sao Paulo. Several of her articles and her current work explore questions of gender, race, and nation-building in Brazil. At the City College, she is also Director of City College Fellowships Program, which supports undergraduates who seek to enter Ph.D. programs.
Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, City College; Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures, Graduate Center
Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Ph.D. New York University, is Distinguished Professor of Spanish-American literature and culture at the Graduate Center and the City College, CUNY, where she co-directs the Cátedra Mario Vargas Llosa. She has held visiting appointments at Colgate University (Colgate Professor of the Humanities) and Columbia University. Among other books, Chang-Rodríguez has written: El discurso disidente: ensayos de literatura colonial peruana (1991), Hidden Messages: Representation and Resistance in Andean Colonial Drama (1999), La palabra y la pluma en “Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno” (2005), Cartografía garcilasista (2013) and Luis Jerónimo de Oré and his “Relación“ (c. 1619): A Peruvian’s Account of Spanish Florida) (2021). She has edited and co-edited important collections such as Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and “La Florida del Inca” (2006), Literatura y cultura en el Virreinato del Perú: apropiación y diferencia (2017) , Vol. 2 of Historia de las literaturas en el Perú, and Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa. A Retrospective (2020). Chang-Rodríguez has published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters in journals and collections from Europe and the Americas, and has contributed to major national and international projects such as Latin American Writers (1989), History of Literature in the Caribbean (1994), Diccionario Enciclopédico de las Letras de América Latina (1995), the Encyclopedia of Latin American History (1996), the Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Art History and Archaeology (2008), The Oxford Handbook on the Latin American Novel (in press). In 2013 she was the guest academic editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, dedicated to Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 Nobel Prize winner. Professor Chang-Rodríguez is the founding editor of Colonial Latin American Review, the prize-winning journal devoted to studying the colonial period from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research projects have been supported by the Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, The Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, the New York Council for the Humanities, the Organization for American States, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Professor Chang-Rodríguez currently serves as board member of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, and Revista de la ANLE. From 1997-2000, she was the President of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana (IILI). A frequent key-note speaker at conferences and symposia, Chang- Rodríguez was the co-anchor of Charlando con Cervantes, a program of interviews with prominent personalities sponsored by CUNY-TV and the Instituto Cervantes. She is an Honorary Associate of the Hispanic Society of America, Doctor Honoris Causa from the National and Kapodistriac University of Athens, Greece, and the recipient of the “Enrique Anderson Imbert,” Career Achievement Award of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE), an affiliate of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.
Colburn, Forrest D.
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College; Ph.D./M.A. program in Political Science, Graduate Center
Forrest D. Colburn is a scholar focusing on governance and economic development in the poorer countries of the world. In addition to his appointment at the City University of New York (CUNY), Professor Colburn has a long-standing and continuing association with the Latin American management school, the INCAE Business School. Professor Colburn taught for a decade at Princeton University, and has been a visiting professor at New York University (NYU), Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia), and the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile). Professor Colburn has worked, too, with the International Labor Organization (ILO), mostly in Latin America, and with business organizations (cámaras) throughout the region. Professor Colburn has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (in Princeton), and has been a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship.
Professor Colburn is the author of The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries and Latin America at the End of Politics, both published by the Princeton University Press. Earlier books were studies of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Professor Colburn’s most recent book is Colonialism, Independence, and the Construction of Nation-States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Professor Colburn is the editor of Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, a project undertaken with James C. Scott. Professor Colburn’s articles have appeared in many academic journals, most prominently in the Journal of Democracy.
Edelman, Marc
Department of Anthropology, Hunter College; Ph.D. Program in Anthropology, Graduate Center
Marc Edelman has a joint appointment as Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He did his first two years of undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and then dropped out of college to travel in Mexico and Central and South America. He finished his B.A. in Anthropology at Columbia in 1975. He later obtained a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia in 1985. Edelman was Research Director of the North American Congress on Latin America in 1985-87 and served on the faculty at Yale in 1987-94. He came to CUNY in 1994. He has also taught or been a visiting researcher at the University of Costa Rica, Tashkent State University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Columbia, Princeton, the Universidad del Cauca in Colombia, and the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales in Ecuador. Edelman has longstanding interests in development issues, environmental and agrarian problems, human rights, and social movements, particularly among peasants and small farmers. During 2011-2018 he researched and participated in the negotiations that led to the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.
Edelman’s books include The Logic of the Latifundio: The Large Estates of Northwestern Costa Rica since the Late Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 1992; Spanish edition Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1998), Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (Stanford University Press, 1999; Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2005), Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects (coauthored, Cambridge University Press, 2007), Estudios agrarios críticos: Tierras, semillas, soberanía alimentaria y los derechos de las y los campesinos (Quito: Editorial del Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, 2016), Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements (coauthored, Fernwood & Practical Action Publishing, 2016; Spanish editions Icaria Barcelona and Fundación Tierra Bolivia, 2017; Portuguese edition Editora da Universidade Estadual Paulista & Editora da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 2021), Activistas empedernidos e intelectuales comprometidos: Ensayos sobre movimientos sociales, derechos humanos y estudios latinoamericanos (Quito: Editorial del Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, 2017), and Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World (coedited, Routledge, 2021).
Edelman has served on various editorial boards, including American Ethnologist, Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos, Cuadernos de Antropología, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Journal of Peasant Studies, Latin American Research Review, and NACLA Report on the Americas. He has held grants and fellowships from several sources, including the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Erickson, Kenneth Paul
Department of Political Science, Hunter College; Ph.D. Program in Political Science, Graduate Center
Kenneth Paul Erickson is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He currently serves on the executive or advisory committees of Hunter’s Department of Political Science, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and Energy and Environmental Policy Studies Program; of the Ph.D. Program in Political Science at the Graduate Center; and of the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS). He is Co-Managing Editor of the journal, Comparative Politics.
Professor Erickson holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Political Science and a Certificate in Latin American Studies from Columbia University. His courses and research interests focus on comparative and international politics in Latin America, and on related policy issues, principally involving energy, environment, narcotics, and human rights:
- Latin American Politics
- Central American Politics
- International Politics in the Americas
- Social Movements, Citizenship, and the State in Latin America
- Drugs, Politics, and Public Policy
- Energy and Environmental Politics and Policy
- Introduction to Comparative Politics.
Professor Erickson has researched in Latin America on Fulbright and other grants, with his principal work in and on Brazil. Most recently, in 1997, he taught and researched as a Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellow at the Center for the Study of Violence of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His book, The Brazilian Corporative State and Working-Class Politics (University of California Press, 1977), won the Hubert Herring Memorial Award of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies. His most recent publication is “Drugs,” in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, 2nd ed. Eds. Joel Krieger, et al. (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Farber, Samuel
Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College; Ph.D. Program in Sociology, Graduate Center
Samuel Farber was born and raised in Marianao, Cuba. He obtained a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1961, an M. Sc. (Econ) in Political Sociology from The London School of Economics (University of London) in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. He is currently a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and also teaches Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published numerous articles on a variety of topics including Cuba and is the author of three books: Revolution and Reaction in Cuba. 1933-1960. A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Wesleyan University Press, 1976); Before Stalinism. The Rise and Decline of Soviet Democracy (Polity Press/Basil Blackwell [U.K.] and Verso [USA],1990); and Social Decay and Transformation. A View From the Left (Lexington Books, 2000).
Filer, Malva E.
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Brooklyn College; Ph. D. Program in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures, Graduate Center
Malva E. Filer, born in Argentina, holds a B. A. from the School of Philosophy and Literature of the National University of Buenos Aires 1958) and a Ph. D. from Columbia University (1966). She is a Professor and Deputy Chair at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of Brooklyn College, and a faculty member of the Ph. D. Program in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center, CUNY, since 1988.
Prof. Filer’s research and publications focus on the Spanish American prose fiction, essay, literary movements and criticism from the 1960s to the present. She has published books on Julio Cortázar and on Antonio Di Benedetto, co-authored, with Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Voces de Hispanoamérica. Antología Literaria, has numerous essays included in volumes on Borges, Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Sarduy, and in other special collections, as well as many articles in literary journals.
Prof. Filer serves on the Editorial Boards of Revista Hispánica Moderna (Columbia University), North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature (Kansas State University), Inti and Alba de América.
Font, Mauricio
Department of Sociology, Queens College; Ph.D. Program in Sociology, Graduate Center; Director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies
Mauricio Font is Professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center and is Director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies and Cuba Project. Has worked extensively on Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, settler societies, and Latin America as a whole. His publications include Transforming Brazil (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, forthcoming); To Craft a New Course (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Toward a New Cuba? (Lynne Rienner, 1996, co-edited with M. Centeno), Integración Económica y Democratización: América Latina y Cuba (University of Chile, 1998; co-editor); Coffee, Contention and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1991). Has taught at Rutgers and the University of Michigan – as well as at the University of Brasilia, UNESP and IUPERJ in Brazil, under awards from the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Program.
Hammond, John L. (Jack)
Department of Sociology, Hunter College, Ph.D. Program in Sociology, Graduate Center
John L. Hammond (Jack) is professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. He is director of the Hunter College Human Rights Program. He received his B.A. from Harvard College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. After teaching at Columbia University, he joined the CUNY faculty in 1977. His current research is on the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Farmworkers’ Movement) and on the use of social science in human rights research and practice.
He is the author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador (Rutgers University Press, 1998); Building Popular Power: Workers’ and Neighborhood Movements in the Portuguese Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1988); and The Politics of Benevolence: Revival Religion and American Voting Behavior (Ablex Publishing Corp., 1979).
He has received research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. In 1996 he was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Violence (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência ) at the University of São Paulo. In 2000-01 he was a fellow in Teaching Human Rights Law at the Columbia Law School.
He is a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives and a member of the Editorial Board of NACLA Report on the Americas.
During the 1980s he was active in the movement against US intervention in Central America. He worked as a consultant to the Regional Government of Region I, Nicaragua, and was a volunteer at the Nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador. He has also served as an interpreter and expert witness on behalf of political asylum applicants. He is presently chair of the LASA Task Force on Human Rights and Academic Freedom.
Hart, Roger
Environmental and Developmental Psychology Programs and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program, Graduate Center
Indych-López, Anna
Art Department, City College; Art History, Graduate Center
Prof. Indych-López joined the Art Department of City College in 2003 and the GC faculty (Ph.D. program in Art History) in 2007. She teaches courses on modern and contemporary art among Latin American, U.S., transatlantic, Afro-diasporic, and Latinx networks. Her work investigates art in the public sphere, especially in Mexico, as well as Latinx and U.S.-Mexico borderlands contemporary art, focusing on cross-cultural intellectual and aesthetic exchanges, the polemics of realisms, and spatial politics. Her 2018 book on Judith Baca probed the Chicana artist’s aesthetic strategies to activate the contested socio-political and racial histories of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s. She is also the author of Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (2009) and co-author (with Leah Dickerman) of Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art (2011, for the exhibition of the same name at The Museum of Modern Art, New York). A frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art (2020) and The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism: 1910–1950(2016), she was awarded the Stuart Z. Katz Professorship of the Humanities and Arts at City College in 2018-2019 and in Fall 2021 received the Alcaly-Bodian CUNY Distinguished Scholar Fellowship at the Graduate Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative. In Spring 2022 she will take up the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.
Low, Setha
Ph.D. Program in Environmental Psychology and Anthropology, Graduate Center
Setha M. Low is Professor of Environmental Psychology and Anthropology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent her early career as Assistant and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, and City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania where she became interested in cultural aspects of design and the anthropology of space and place. She has published extensively including On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (2000, University of Texas Press), Theorizing the City (edited,1999, Rutgers University Press), Children of the Urban Poor: Sociocultural Development in Guatemala City (with F. J. Johnston, 1995, Westview Press), Place Attachment (edited with I. Altman, 1992, Plenum Publishing), Housing, Culture, and Design (edited with E. Chambers,1989, University of Pennsylvania Press), as well Culture, Politics and Medicine in Costa Rica (1985, Gordon and Beach).
Professor Low has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship a Fulbright Research Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Canadian Social Research Council, and the National Science Foundation. On November 18, 2000, she was awarded the Textor Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, a national career award.
Setha Low is writing and lecturing about gated communities, editing a volume entitled Cultural Spaces for Blackwell Publishers with Denise Lawrence, and completing a book on Creating Cultural Spaces for the University of Texas Press. She continues to be interested in the politics of public space both in New York City and East Hampton. As Director of the Public Space Research Group at the Center for Human Environments (CUNY) she has completed studies of cultural diversity in New York City and National Park Service parks, and consults on cultural values in historic preservation for the Getty Institute in Los Angeles and Municipal Arts Society of New York City.
Manthorne, Katherine
Ph.D. Program in Art History, Graduate Center
Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Art of the Americas at the Graduate Center. She focuses on nineteenth-century Latin America, the United States, and border crossings between them. Her books and exhibition publications include Creation & Renewal. Vies of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, DC, 1985); Tropical Renaissance. North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (Washington, D.C. 1989); The Landscapes of Louis Rémy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad (North Carolina, 1996) with John Coffey; El Barón de Courcy. Ilustraciones de un viaje, 1831-1833 (Mexico City, 1998) with Pablo Diener. She was also a contributing author in The Art of Juan Manuel Blanes (Buenos Aires, 1994) and Paisaje Americano. Explorar el Eden (Madrid, 2000).
She has been the recipient of various grants and awards including a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship. Prior to her arrival at CUNY in January 2000, she was head of the Resident Research Center in American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and Executive Editor of its journal American Art; previously she was Chairperson of the Art History Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. working with Barbara Novak in the Art History and Archaeology Dept., Columbia University.
Torres-Vélez, Victor
Latin American & Caribbean Studies Unit, Humanities Department, Hostos Community College
Dr. Víctor M. Torres-Vélez is an Assistant Professor in the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Unit of the Humanities Department at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, City University of New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico (1996) and his M.A. (2003) and Ph.D. (2007) from Michigan State University. He is a critical medical anthropologist by training, who specializes in gender, justice and environmental change. Dr. Torres-Vélez’ interdisciplinary theoretical expertise and interests are diverse. Some of these include: gender, race, environmental justice, and theories of social change. Dr. Torres-Vélez’ regional focus is Latinx and Latin America and the Caribbean, with an emphasis in Puerto Rico.
Contreras, Eduardo
Department of History, Hunter College
Eduardo Contreras is a historian of the United States and Central America. His research specializations include U.S. Latina/o/x histories, labor, race, and migration. He is the author of Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). He’s now at work on “North American Capital, Central American Labor: From the Gold Rush to the Early Cold War,” an investigation of working people’s responses to U.S. corporate enterprises in Central America since the mid-nineteenth century.
López Adorno, Pedro
Department of Africana/Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College
Pedro López Adorno is a Puerto Rican poet, novelist, literary critic, and anthologist. His maternal grandmother brought him to New York in 1965 and he has lived here ever since. He received his PhD from NYU in 1982. He has been teaching at the college level since 1980 and at Hunter College since 1987. His areas of expertise are Latin American poetry; contemporary Caribbean literature in Spanish; Puerto Rican literature from colonial times to the present; Latino literature in the US; and literary criticism and theory related to the above.
As a poet, he is considered a key voice within the generation of Latin American poets born after 1950. Author of thirteen books, his most recent are: La ciudad prestada/Poesía latinoamericana posmoderna en Nueva York (2002), Arte de cenizas/Poesía escogida/1991-1999 (2004), and Opera ardiente (2009). His work, which fuses neobaroque and postmodern elements, is included in a number of important anthologies such as: El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (1997), Nueva Poesía Latinoamericana (1999), Entre Rascacielos/Amidst Skyscrapers (Twelve Hispanic Poets in New York) (2000), and Una gravedad alegre, Antología de la poesía latinoamericana al siglo XXI (2007). His first volume of poetry in English, Against Abluvion, remains unpublished. He is currently working on two new volumes of poetry, a selection of personal and critical essays, and a novel.
Elizabeth Nunez
English Department, Hunter College
Elizabeth Nunez emigrated from Trinidad after completing high school there. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from New York University. She is a distinguished professor here at Hunter College and an award-winning author of seven novels: Anna-In-Between; Prospero’s Daughter (New York Times Editors’ Choice; 2006 Novel of the Year, Black Issues Book Review); Grace; Discretion (short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award); Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award); Beyond the Limbo Silence (Independent Publishers Book Award); and When Rocks Dance. Her audiobooks include Grace and Prospero’s Daughter (BBC/America) and Discretion (Recorded Books).
Called “a master of pacing and plotting” in the New York Times review of Prospero’s Daughter, Nunez has received a great deal of praise for both the style and content of her writing. NALIS launched the Fifth Annual One Book, One Community nationwide reading project on April 14, 2010, and their fifth selection was Dr. Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter. Black Issues Book Review describes Bruised Hibiscus as “moving, powerful and haunting” and Booklist says of Beyond the Limbo Silence that Nunez has a writing style that “will remind many of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.” Beyond the Limbo Silence was also picked by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 1998. Publisher’s Weekly says that the prose in Grace is “exquisitely tuned” and the narrative unfolds with “understated elegance,” and The Seattle Times comments that “Discretion delivers two memorable characters whose personal culture clashes, both shared and internalized, are as telling as those of the world they inhabit.”
Nunez is also Co-Editor with Jennifer Sparrow of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad, Co-Editor with Brenda Greene of the collection of essays, Black Writers in the 90’s, and Author of several monographs of literary criticism. She is a former Fellow of Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies. A Co-Founder of the National Black Writers Conference, and Director from 1986-2000, Nunez received grant awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as grants from The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Reed Foundation for these conferences. She continues her work in support of writers of color with her radio program on WBAI 99.5FM and as Chair of the PEN American Open Book committee. She is also Executive Producer of the 2004 NY Emmy-nominated CUNY TV series Black Writers in America.
Roldán, Mary
Department of History, Hunter College
Mary Roldán holds the Dorothy Epstein Chair in Latin American History at Hunter College and has a faculty appointment in Latin American history at the Graduate Center, (CUNY). She received her BA, MA and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and specializes in twentieth century Colombian social and political history. Her research, writing and teaching interests include: violence, state formation, peace studies, urban history, drug trafficking, Catholic transnationalism, Cold War rural development projects, and the relationship between media (radio), politics, and the public sphere in Colombia. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Historia Critica (Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá) and Estudios Sociales (Universidad Nacional, Bogotá). She has consulted for and worked with a variety government, non-governmental, and cultural institutions including the U.S. Institute of Peace, Social Science Research Council, National Public Radio, Radio Nacional de Colombia, COLCIENCIAS, Banco de la República, and Planeación Nacional (Colombia). Her research and publications have been adopted as the basis for the historical reconstruction of twentieth century violence in Antioquia, Colombia for the Museo Casa de la Memoria in Medellín, the first museum in Colombia devoted to the memory of the victims of twentieth century violence. Her book A Sangre y Fuego (Bogotá: ICANH, Banco de la República, 2003) won the 2003 Fundación Alejandro Angel Escobar National Social Science and Humanities book prize and was named (Arcadia, June 2014) one of the essential books for understanding Colombia’s ongoing conflict. She has been a recipient of Fulbright, COLCIENCIAS (Colombia), MacArthur Peace Studies, Society for the Humanities (Cornell University), and the Robert and Helen Appel (Cornell University) awards and grants. She is a Roosevelt House Faculty Associate and teaches in the Thomas Hunter Honors Program as well as the History Departments at Hunter and the Graduate Center. Recent publications include: Radio Sutatenza: una revolución cultural en el campo colombiano (Banco de la República, 2017), “Communication for Change”: Radio Sutatenza/Acción Cultural Popular, the Catholic Church, and Rural Development in Colombia during the Cold War” in Andra B. Chastain and Timothy W. Lorek, eds., Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology and the Environment in Latin America’s Long Cold War (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and “Popular Cultural Action, Catholic Transnationalism, and Development in Colombia before Vatican II” in Stephen J.C. Andes and Julia C. Young, eds., Local Church, Global Church. Catholic Activism in the Americas before Vatican II (Catholic University of America Press, 2016.) She is currently completing two monographs, Broadcast Nation: Radio, Culture, and Politics in Colombia, 1930-1962 and Acción Cultural Popular: the Business of Rural Development and the Politics of Catholic Transnationalism in Cold War Colombia(1947-1990).
Barrios, Luis
Professor, Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Luis Barrios is a Board Certified Forensic Examiner and a professor of Latina/o psychology; Latin American studies; ethnic studies; qualitative research and methodology; and cultural criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Professor, Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies-John Jay College of Criminal Justice and member of Ph.D. faculties in social/personality psychology, Graduate Center-City University of New York. Since 1988, Dr. Barrios is a columnist of El Diario La Prensa in New York City, one of the oldest Spanish newspapers in the United States.
He is the co-editor with Louis Kontos and David C. Brotherton of Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspective (2003-Columbia University); co-author with David C. Brotherton of Almighty Latin King & Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang (2004-Columbia University); and co-editor with Dr. Mauro Cerbino of Otras naciones: Jóvenes, transnacionalismo y exclusión. Quito: Ecuador: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. Dr. Barrios is also the author of Josconiando: Dimensiones Sociales y políticas de la espiritualidad (2000-Editorial Aguiar), Pitirreando: De la desesperanza a la esperanza (2004-Editorial Edil) and Coquiando: Meditaciones subversivas para un mundo mejor (2008-Editorial Búho).
Awarded in December 2014 Honorary Professorship from the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo-UASD- Law & Political Sciences Faculty.
Fr. Luis Barrios is also a priest with the Anglican-Episcopal Church Diocese of New York.
Lapidus, Benjamin
Department of Art and Music, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Benjamin Lapidus teaches popular music of the Caribbean, guitar, world music, and other courses. Lapidus has also taught Cuban tres and guitar in the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program at the New School University. He has given master classes and workshops on Caribbean music throughout the world, under the auspices of Carnegie Hall and The Smithsonian Institution, and numerous other institutions throughout the United States. Lapidus served as a scholar-in-residence for the Jewish Museum of New York during several humanitarian trips to Cuba. He has published a book about changüí and the music of Eastern Cuba as well as peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Cuban and Puerto Rican music. As a musician, Lapidus has performed and recorded throughout the world with a Who’s Who of musicians in Spanish Caribbean music, classical, and jazz. Since its inception in 1996, he has led the Latin jazz group Sonido Isleno and has produced five internationally acclaimed albums of his original compositions. Regarded as a virtuoso of the Cuban tres and guitar, he remains an in-demand performer, arranger, composer, and lecturer. His eighth recording as a leader, “Generaciones” will be released shortly and features master musicians from Cuba, Panama, Colombia, and New York City.
Oboler, Suzanne
Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Suzanne Oboler is Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She is Founding Editor of the academic journal, Latino Studies (2002-2012).
Professor Oboler is author of Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (1995) and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. She is editor of Latinos and Citizenship: The Dilemma of Belonging (2006), and Behind Bars: Latino/as and Prison in the United States (2009). She is Co-Editor in Chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Contemporary Politics, Law and Social Movements (2 Volumes; 2015). In 2005 she co-edited Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos (2005), and was co-editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino/as in the United States, 4 Volumes.
Professor Oboler lectures widely across the country and abroad, on issues related to Latinxs in the US and to the field of Latinx Studies in the United States. Her research and teaching interests center on Human Rights in the Americas, focusing on race, immigration, citizenship and national belonging; she is currently conducting research in the areas of racism and immigration, refugees and belonging in the Americas.
In 2011, she was named Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at PUC, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Pérez, Lisandro
Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Lisandro Pérez is Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies at John Jay College, City University of New York. He received a Ph.D. degree in Sociology and Latin American Studies from the University of Florida. Pérez has served as editor of the journal Cuban Studies and co-authored The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Allyn & Bacon, 2003). He has published in the Latin American Research Review, International Migration Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, Cuban Studies, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, among other journals. His most recent book, Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 2018), won the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York history, awarded by the New York Academy of History. A Spanish edition of the book was published in 2020 by Casa de las Américas, a leading Cuban cultural institution. For a more information, including a complete vita, see: https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/lisandro-pérez
Roure, Jodie
Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Jodie G. Roure, JD, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Latin American and Latinx Studies Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY where she has taught for over 20 years. She was a Special End Mass Incarceration Campaign Fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union. She is the lead organizer, founder, and CEO of Hurricane Maria Assistance & Relief Institutional Alliance, Inc. (Hurricane MARIA) (https://hmariainc.weebly.com/), Hurricane MARIA, Inc., (formerly Doctors for Maria Relief) is a 501c3 not for profit organization incorporated for the chariatable purpose of aiding persons who are victims of natural disasters occurring in Puerto Rico or elsewhere in the Caribbean. The humanitarian aid medical relief effort post hurricane Maria provided medical, food, and other donation relief efforts throughout the island of Puerto Rico in October 2017 with over 25 doctors, nurses and other volunteers from across the United States. Dr. Roure also served as a Scholar in Residence at the Inter American University School of Law, Puerto Rico, from 2012-2013 where she taught and also worked with the Puerto Rico Judicial System on a study of the processing of domestic violence cases. She has been featured on VICE as an expert for her work on domestic violence in Brasil and on other networks. She teaches in the areas of domestic violence/gender rights, criminal justice, international human rights, international criminal justice, race, class and ethnicity in the United States, and Latina/o Studies.
Dr. Roure is also the John Jay College Founder, Project Investigator, and Director of the Diversity Prelaw Pipeline Programs (formerly the Ronald H. Brown Law School Prep Program at JJC) & Director of the University of Houston Law Center Pre-Law Pipeline Program at John Jay College. For over 20 years, she has assisted in securing the admissions and matriculation of hundreds of low income and underrepresented students into law school and graduate school. Committed to diversifying the legal profession, Dr. Roure works with numerous law schools across the country on creating diversity pipeline programs. She has worked with the University at Buffalo’s Discover Law Program, the St. John’s University School of Law Prelaw Pipeline Program, Western New England University School of Law, and many more to develop undergraduate prelaw pipeline programs. She partakes in the summer law school offerings, and more importantly provides year long individualized student support (12 month) to participating students. The Diversity Prelaw Pipeline Program offers a variety of governmental & non-governmental legal internships exposing students to all areas of the law year round by providing holistic consistent support and targeted assistance with the law school application process. In 2020, 13 students in the program were accepted to over 45 law schools with a combined scholarship of $4.5 million.
Tovar, Patricia
Department of Anthropology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; & The Graduate Center, CUNY
Patricia Tovar is a Professor in the Anthropology Departments of John Jay and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has a P.h.D. in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center (1995), and a Masters degree in Applied Anthropology from CCNY, and a BA from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. During the Fall of 2014, she was a Distinguished Fellow at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Tovar has been a member of the Executive Board and Treasurer of the Latin American Studies Association, LASA, for a number of years, and at John Jay College since 2008. From 2006 to 2008 she was affiliated with Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. Before that, she was the head of the Social Anthropology section of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. She has been a consultant with the Panamanian government, with the Colombian Science and Technology Entity, Colciencias. For several years, she was the coeditor of the Revista Colombiana de Antropología. She is constatly invited to give expert opinions on human rights, and gender and violence.
Mann-Hamilton, Ryan
Department of Social Science, La Guardia Community College
Dr. Ryan Mann-Hamilton is Assistant Professor in the Social Science Department at CUNY LaGuardia and teaches a variety of courses in Anthropology, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. Dr. Mann-Hamilton has extensive experience working on land and marine based conservation projects and supporting and participating in food sovereignty projects in the Caribbean, and environmental justice activism in the context of the Americas. Additionally, he was a founding member of the AfroLatin@ Forum and the activist collective We are All Dominican. He is currently the faculty Co-Leader of the Presidents Society Environment Program and was also selected as Faculty Lead by the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center to direct a two year public engagement program focusing on the relationship between race, environment and the humanities that will center the experiences and existing networks between communities in New York and those in the Caribbean. He has extensive experience in public programming, environmental consulting and curriculum development. His most recent publication was a chapter on community centered fisheries conservation and education programs that were developed in the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas and the lessons learned from that endeavor.
Badillo, David
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College
David A. Badillo, Associate Professor in Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College, on various aspects of U.S. Latino history. His teaching interests also include Mexican Migration, Latin American Colonial History, and World Empires and Imperialism. He has published Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Latinos in Michigan (Michigan State University Press, 2003) and has written numerous journal articles and chapters in edited volumes on themes encompassing religion, urbanization, and the Latino civil rights movement. He is currently preparing a book on the sociolegal impact of desegregation on Mexican-American education history. Prior to arriving at Lehman, he taught at the University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Wayne State University. He also served as visiting graduate faculty for the Hispanic Summer Program at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce, Puerto Rico.
Find more about his work here: https://www.lehman.edu/academics/arts-humanities/latin-puerto-rican-studies/faculty-badillo.php
Bergad, Laird W.
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College; Ph.D. Program in History, Graduate Center
Laird W. Bergad is Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College and the Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A member of CUNY’s faculty since 1980, he is the founding and current executive director of the CUNY Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (2001).
He did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin where he received a B.A. degree in History in 1970. An M.A. was completed at the University of Pittsburgh in 1974 and a Ph.D. was conferred in Latin American and Caribbean history in 1980. At the graduate level he specialized in economic, demographic, social history and data analysis of large-scale data bases.
Professor Bergad’s research interests have revolved around the social, economic, and demographic history of slave-based plantation societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. His first book, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Princeton University Press, 1983), was based upon previously unutilized documentary materials housed at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. This work revised the analytical framework for understanding Puerto Rican history prior to the United States occupation and annexation of 1898 by systematically demonstrating that the island’s economic structure had made the transition to a fully developed market economy during the 19th century.
He was one of the first foreign scholars to be granted unrestricted access to Cuban historical archives during the early 1980s, and his work there resulted in the publication of two books. The first, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton University Press, 1990), is a detailed examination of the rise and evolution of the sugar plantation economy in the most important sugar-producing region of the world (the Cuban province of Matanzas) during the 19th century.
The second, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1995) [co-authored with Fe Iglesias García and María Carmen Barcia of the Cuban Institute of History] was the first empirical examination of the demographic and price structure of Cuban slave society during the island’s reign as the Caribbean’s leading sugar-producing and slave importing society.
Professor Bergad turned his attention to Brazil where he began work in 1992 in the historical archives of Brazil’s largest slave-holding province during the 18th and 19th centuries, Minas Gerais. The Demographic and Economic History of Slavery in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) is a detailed study of slavery in Brazil and has been translated into Portuguese as A Escravidão e a História Econômica e Demográfica de Minas Gerais, Brasil, 1720-1888 (São Paulo: EDUSC, 2005).
In 2007 Professor Bergad published The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States was published by Cambridge University Press.
Hispanics in America: A Social, Economic, and Demographic History, 1980 – 2005 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and was coauthored with Prof. Herbert S. Klein, Emeritus Professor of Latin American History, Columbia University.
Professor Bergad’s most recent book, co-authored with Prof. César Ayala of UCLA is titled AGRARIAN PUERTO RICO: Reconsidering Rural Economy and Society, 1899 – 1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) was awarded the Manual Moreno Fraginals prize for the best book on Caribbean economic history from the Caribbean Economic History Association.
Professor Bergad is currently writing a demographic, economic, and social history of the Latino population of the New York City metropolitan area, 1900 – 2020.
Professor Bergad has won a number of internationally recognized awards. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1986/87 and won a research grant from the Social Science Research Council in the same years. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 1992/93 and was awarded a second Fulbright to teach at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain in 2000 (Declined). He also won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 1996 and 1997.
Burns, Mila
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, Lehman College
Dr. Mila Burns’s interdisciplinary profile influences her research, with an emphasis on media, anthropology, and history. For almost two decades, she has been a prominent journalist in Brazil and New York. She is currently the anchor and editor-in-chief of America News, a newscast dedicated to the Latino community broadcast at TV Globo International.
Professor Burns is currently working on a book about the Brazilian influence on the Chilean 1973 coup d’état. Based on recently declassified documents from Brazilian and Chilean archives, it looks at how the Brazilian government, diplomats, and exiles perceived Salvador Allende’s “road to socialism” and acted to impact it.
Her most recent book, Dona Ivone Lara’s Sorriso Negro (Bloombsbury Academic, 2019 and Editora Cobogó, 2021), investigates Dona Ivone Lara’s album to address broader questions about feminist and black movements in the early 1980s Brazil. At the time, the country’s long-lasting dictatorship was coming to an end and the Brazilian samba composer, a black woman, called for change in her lyrics.
Castillo Planas, Melissa
Department of English, Lehman College; English PhD Program, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas is an Associate Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, NY and the CUNY Graduate Center PhD program in English specializing in Latinx Literature and Culture. She is the author of the poetry collection Coatlicue Eats the Apple, editor of the anthology, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets, co-editor of La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades and co-author of the novel, Pure Bronx. Her most recent scholarly book project, with Rutgers University Press’ new Global Race and Media series (March 2020), A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture, examines the creative worlds and cultural productions of Mexican migrants in New York City. Her second book of poetry, Chingona Rules, was released with Finishing Line Press in September 2021 and was a Gold Medal Winner of the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, International Latino Book Awards (2022). Her forthcoming co-edited volume, Scholars in COVID Times is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in 2023. At Lehman College, Melissa serves as Director of the English Honors Program, Faculty Advisor to Obscura, the Literary and Arts Magazine of Lehman College, a Senator of the CUNY Faculty Senate. She is Co-Director of the Bronx Latino History Project, a joint project with the Bronx County Historical Society.
Melissa’s short stories, articles, poetry and essays have been published in numerous collections such as Centering Borders: Explorations in South Asia and Latin America, Afro-Latinos in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas, The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Popular Culture and diverse scholarly and media publications including Border – Lines, Lengua y Literature, Acentos Review, Hispanic Culture Review, El Diario/La Prensa, CNN.com The Bilingual Review, Women’s Studies, and Words. Beats. Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture, a publication for which she has also served as guest editor (“The Brazil Issue,” 2016). Melissa has given lectures and poetry readings all over the world including Jadavpur University (Kolkata, India), Seoul National University, Harvard University, Syracuse University, SUNY Potsdam, Swarthmore University, University of Notre Dame, University of Chicago, University of Long Island – BK, and Fordham University.
Prior to joining the faculty at Lehman College, Melissa completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History where she taught courses in Latinx Cultural Studies and organized the first ever Latinx Poetry Reading and Workshop Series. She earned her PhD in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University in 2017, a Master’s in English and creative writing from Fordham University, and a Bachelor of Arts from New York University summa cum laude with a double major in Journalism and Latin American Studies. To learn more visit www.melissacastilloplanas.com
Fiol-Matta, Licia
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College
Licia Fiol-Matta’s research has focused on the intersection of gender, culture and nation in twentieth century Latin America, the Caribbean, and the US Latino population. She bridges several fields and employs diverse methodologies, principally archival research, psychoanalytic theory, and discursive analysis. Her work is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on literature, media, and music.
Gálvez, Alyshia
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College
Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural and medical anthropologist. She is professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College and of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Most of her work is at the intersection of migration, health and conceptualizations of citizenship. She is currently conducting new research on epistemologies of food, health, and nutrition, as well as, in a separate project, the colonial assumptions underlying higher education pedagogies, technologies and bureaucracies.
Gálvez is the author of Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico (UC Press, 2018) on changing food policies, systems and practices in Mexico and Mexican communities in the United States, including the ways they are impacted by trade and economic policy, and their public health implications. She is the author of two previous books on Mexican migration, Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care and the Birth Weight Paradox (Rutgers University Press, Oct. 2011) and Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants (NYU Press, Dec. 2009).
Levy, Teresita
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College
Teresita A. Levy is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College. She is a trained historian and researcher, and her courses deal with the history of Latin America and the Caribbean and their diasporas. Her research focuses on the economic history of the Spanish Caribbean. Professor Levy’s book, Puerto Ricans in the Empire: Tobacco Growers and U.S. Colonialism, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2014. In this book, Professor Levy argues that Puerto Ricans demanded and won inclusion in the U.S. empire, in terms that were defined not only by the colonial power, but also by the colonized. She is currently researching a new book about recent efforts in tobacco farming and production in Puerto Rico and how those are tied to activism regarding nutritional self-sufficiency, sustainable agriculture, and political sovereignty. Professor Levy has a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in History from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a M.S. in Counseling from Long Island University, C.W. Post Campus.
Ricourt, Milagros
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College
Professor Ricourt’s early research was the ethnographic work she conducted in the New Immigrants and Old American Project of Queens College, City University of New York, directed by Roger Sanjek. Her dissertation and book Hispanas de Queens were based on the ethnographic work conducted in Corona, Queens as part of this project. She conducted additional research in Washington Heights while doing a post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Milano School of Urban Studies at the New School. The data collected produced the book Power from the Margins. Other research includes Dominican peasantry, domestic violence in the Dominican community of Washington Heights, New York City, and Dominican undocumented immigration to Puerto Rico. Her latest book, “Dominican Racial Imaginary” (Rutgers University Press, 2016), received an Honorable mention in 2017 at the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award from the Caribbean Studies Association. The book is also available in Spanish as “El imaginario racial dominicano”.
Totti, Xavier
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, Lehman College, Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Xavier Totti has published on issues relating to health in Puerto Rico, political myths in Brazil, Puerto Rican political activism in the United States, the political organization of squatters in Puerto Rico, Latino identity and Puerto Rican anthropology in the following journals: Revista de Salud Pública de Puerto Rico, Journal of Folklore Research, CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Raízes: Revista de Ciências Sociais e Econômicas, Dissent, The Portable Lower East Side, and Caribbean Studies.
Torres, Andrés
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College, Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Dr. Torres retired from Lehman College in 2017. Since joining Lehman in 2010 as Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Andrés Torres has taught courses on Latin@s in the United States, Latino Political Economy, Latino New York, and Latino Urban Development.
His past publications include Latinos in New England (2006, editor); The Puerto Rican Movement (1998, co-editor); Workforce Development: Health Care and Human Services (New England Journal of Public Policy, Special Issue, 1997, co-editor); and Between Melting Pot and Mosaic: African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the New York Political Economy (1995). Dr. Torres is also the author of Signing in Puerto Rican: A Hearing Son and His Deaf Parents, a memoir about his growing up in an extended deaf family. His parents were among the first deaf migrants to come to New York City from the Caribbean and Sign was his first language.
Recent writings include: “Pathways to Economic Opportunity: An Overview of Innovative Career Pathway Collaborations for Latinos in Frontline Health Care Occupations”, (co-author), Hispanic Health Care International, 12:2 (2014): 81-89; review of Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States, Jorge Duany, for The Americas 71:2 (October 2014): 362-364; “Latino New York: An Introduction”, in NACLA Report on the Americas, 46: 4 (Winter 2013):16-20; “Puerto Rican Studies: Four Decades and Counting”, Latino(a) Research Review (2011-2012) 8, 9-24; and review of Encountering American Fault Lines, by José Itzigsohn, for The Journal of American Ethnic History(Summer 2012) 31:4, 131-133. Forthcoming publications are: “Puerto Ricans” and “Puerto Rican Civil Rights Movement”, entries in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Politics, Law, and Social Movements(2015/2016); and “Where Have All the Puerto Ricans Gone? Outmigration from New York City: 1985-2000” (co-author), in Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition, (Notre Dame Press), Second Edition, (2015/16). More recent publications include ‘Reflections on a Return to Lehman College,’ in Puerto Rican Studies in the City University of New York (Centro Press, 2021), María E. Pérez y González and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, eds., and Revolution Around the Corner: Voices from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in the United States (Temple University Press, 2021), co-editor with José E. Velázquez and Carmen V. Rivera.
Nunez, Elizabeth
Department of English, Medgar Evers College
Elizabeth Nunez is a Distinguished Professor of English at Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York, where she designed, developed and implemented many of the college’s first major academic programs. She received her Ph.D. (1977) and M.A. (1971) degrees in English from New York University, and her B.A. degree in English from Marian College in Wisconsin. She is the Director of the National Black Writers Conferences (NBWC), sponsored by five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nunez’s publications include the novels Bruised Hibiscus, Beyond the Limbo Silence, which won the 1999 Independent Publishers Book Award in the multi-cultural fiction category, and When Rocks Dance. Her fourth novel, Discretion, will be published by Ballantine in 2002. She is co-editor of the collection of essays Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the 90s, and author of several literary monographs. Nunez chairs the PEN American Open Book committee, which focuses on providing access for people of color to various aspects of the publishing industry. She has served as an evaluator for national and local programs in the arts and education and has raised over $10 million dollars in grants for educational, social and cultural programs in Brooklyn, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Vera Rubin Residency Fellowship for the Yaddo Artists Colony, the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Black Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, and the Carter G. Woodson Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Marian College, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, for her contributions to education and the arts.
Fernandes, Sujatha
Department of Sociology, Queens College
Sujatha Fernandes is Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2003. She has taught classes on Social Theory, Latin American politics, Caribbean politics and society, and cultural politics. Her research interests include hip hop culture; neoliberalism; state-society relations; urban public space; and the role of culture in social movements; with an area focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. Dr Fernandes has been the recipient of various fellowships, including a Wilson-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2003-2006) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center (2007-2008). In 2008, she was awarded the Feliks Gross Award from the CUNY Academy for Arts and Sciences in recognition of outstanding research. She is currently a mid-career Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Dr. Fernandes is the author of Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, October 2006) and Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press, April 2010). Her most recent book is Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso, September 2011).
Pérez-Rosario, Vanessa
Department of English, Queens College
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Davis.
She is the author of Becoming Julia de Burgos: The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon (University of Illinois Press 2014), which will be published in a Spanish edition titled “Julia de Burgos: la creación de un ícono puertorriqueño” later this year (University of Illinois Press 2021). She is editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement (Palgrave 2010).
She translated into English Mayra Santos-Febres’ collection of poetry titled Boat People (Cardboard House Press 2021). She is editor of “I am my own path: A Bilingual Anthology of Julia de Burgos’ Writings” (under review). This anthology will make the prose and letters of Julia de Burgos widely available for the first time.
Vanessa Pérez-Rosario is managing editor of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is curator of Off the Page: Conversations with Writers, a Queens College literary reading and speaker series.
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Henken, Ted
Department of Black and Hispanic Studies, Baruch College
Professor Ted Henken holds a Doctorate from Tulane University’s Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies with a dual appointment in the Department Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York.
A past winner of Baruch College’s Presidential Excellence Award in Distinguished Teaching (2007), Henken specializes in courses on contemporary Cuban culture and society, sociology of the Internet, contemporary Latin America, Latinos in the U.S., racism and ethnic relations, the sociology of religion, international migration, and comparative urban studies courses on Havana, New York, and New Orleans.
Mathews-Salazar, Patricia
Director, Center for Ethnic Studies, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Patricia Mathews-Salazar was born and raised in Lima Peru. In 1985, she was awarded a fellowship to attend graduate studies at Indiana University, where she received an MA in Anthropology in 1988. She later transferred to Yale University and received a PhD also in Anthropology in 1997.
During her years at Yale, she worked at the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies, and was a teaching fellow in Anthropology and History departments. She also worked in the Prison and Immigration clinics at the Yale Law School, as a translator and legal interpreter.
Patricia Mathews-Salazar has taught at Connecticut College, Quinnipiac University and also at Fordham University–Rose Hill campus while living in Connecticut.
In 2000, she started teaching at BMCC as assistant professor of Anthropology in the Social Sciences. In 2005, she received an appointment from the Anthropology Department at the Graduate Center, to become a member of its doctoral faculty.
In 2008, she became Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies at BMCC.
Aja, Alan A.
Department: Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College
Alan A. Aja is assistant professor and deputy chair in the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies. His latest publications include pieces on affirmative action with Daniel Bustillo in the Journal of Public Law and Policy (forthcoming, fall 2014), federal jobs guarantee with Darrick Hamilton, William Darity, Jr. and Daniel Bustillo in Social Research (fall 2013), democratic rights with Miranda Martinez inLatino/a Research Review (fall 2012), and black/Latino coalitions in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (fall 2012). Before academia, Aja worked as a labor organizer in Texas, an environmental researcher in Cuba, a human rights organizer in Argentina and in a refugee hostel in London. His current research explores the lives of Afro-Cubans in South Florida, and he is assisting on a documentary/news piece by filmmaker Rudy Valdez on the impact of mandatory minimum sentencing policies on families.
Ebert, Christopher C.
Department: History, Brooklyn College
Christopher Ebert, a California native, received his undergraduate degree from San Francisco State University, a school that has much in common with Brooklyn College.
Fernández Olmos, Margarite
Department of Spanish, Brooklyn College
Margarite Fernández Olmos is Professor of Spanish at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. A recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Research Council, she has lectured and written extensively on contemporary Caribbean and Latin American literatures. Fernández Olmos is author of La cuentística de Juan Bosch: un análisis crítico cultural (1982) and Sobre la literatura puertorriqueña de aquí y de allá: aproximaciones feministas (1989, and co-editor with Doris Meyer of Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America: New Translations and Introductory Essays (1983). Her more recent books are Pleasure in the Word: Erotic Writings by Latin American Women (1993), Remaking a Lost Harmony: Stories from the Hispanic Caribbean (1995), Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah and the Caribbean (1997, all co-edited and translated with Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, The Latino Reader: An American Literary Tradition from 1542 to the Present (1997) with Harold Augenbraum, (1997), Rudolfo A. Anaya: A Critical Companion (1999), and two collections of essays: U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers (2000), co-edited with Harold Augenbraum, and Healing Cultures: Art and Religion as Curative Practices in the Caribbean and its Diaspora (2001), co-edited with Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert.
Martínez, Miranda
Department: Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College
Miranda Martinez is an associate professor at Brooklyn College. Her work focuses on community-based movements and the Latino experience of urban space. Her book Power at the Roots: Gentrification, Community Gardens, and the Puerto Ricans of the Lower East Side was published by Lexington Books. In 2012 she published with Alan Aja the article “Democratic Rights and Nuyorican Identity in the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño” in Latino(a) Research Review. In November 2009 her article “Attack of the Butterfly Spirits: The Impact of Movement Framing by Community Garden Preservation Activists” was published in the journal Social Movement Studies. She is a board member of the Cooper Square Land Trust in lower Manhattan, and was a board member of the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Currently, Martinez is conducting interviews with Brooklyn homeowners experiencing foreclosure as a result of subprime mortgages.
Pérez González, María
Department: Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College
Pérez, Vanessa Y.
Department: Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Brooklyn College
Braveboy-Wagner, Jacqueline
Department of Political Science, City College; Director, The Masters Program in International Relations, City College; Ph.D. Program in Political Science, Graduate Center
Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1979. She is a specialist in foreign policy with an area studies focus on the Caribbean small states, Caribbean-Latin American, and Caribbean-Asian relations. Her books include: Caribbean Public Policy: Regional, Cultural and Socioeconomic Issues for the 21st Century (co-editor with Dennis Gayle; Boulder, CO: Westview 1997); The Caribbean in the Pacific Century (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1993, with W. Marvin Will, Dennis G. Gayle, and I. Griffith); The Caribbean in World Affairs: The Foreign Policies of the English-Speaking Caribbean (Westview Press, 1989) which is currently being thoroughly revised and will be published by the same press in 2001 as The Caribbean in International Affairs: The Foreign Policies of CARICOM Nations; Interpreting the Third World: Politics, Economics and Social Issues (New York: CBS/Praeger, 1986); and The Venezuela-Guyana Border Dispute: A Study in Conflict Resolution (Westview 1984). In addition, a small volume of essays was published by the Caribbean Research Center as Caribbean Diplomacy (1995). She is currently editing a volume entitled Re-Conceptualizing Global South Foreign Policy to be published by Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Prof. Braveboy-Wagner has served as President and Vice-President of the Caribbean Studies Association, the leading international association of scholars devoted to the study of the broader Caribbean, and has twice been honored for her work on the Caribbean. For many years, she has also served as the United Nations-NGO representative of the International Studies Association, and as such sits on the ISA’s Governing Council. She has published numerous articles and analytical pieces in books and journals and has presented some 60 papers at national and international conferences and workshops. She has also served as a consultant on various United Nations, United States, Caribbean, and Latin American government projects, and has received several grants within and outside CUNY.
Carlson, Jerry W.
Department of Media & Communication Arts, City College; senior producer for City University Television in New York City
Jerry W. Carlson is an assistant professor in the Department of Media & communication Arts of the City College (CUNY) and senior producer for City University Television in New York City. A specialist in narrative theory, global and American independent film, and the cinemas of the Spanish and French speaking peoples, he was the Guest Editor of an issue of Review: Latin American Literature & Arts dedicated to cinema. He is the producer of Charlando con Cervantes, a television series offering interviews with leading Latin American & Caribbean writers, artists, & filmmakers. In addition, he has curated retrospectives of Cuban, Mexican, Colombian, Argentine, and Venezuelan films, among others, for his regular television series City Cinematheque. Among his recent publications are an interview with Guatemalan filmmaker Luis Argueta and an essay about the responses of Caribbean cinema to modernization. He is currently researching a book to be titled Migrating Spirits: Cinemas of the Tropical Atlantic that investigates how films from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States represent the social formations created by the plantation system and its aftermath. He has conducted research and lectured extensively in Latin America and the Caribbean. Educated at Williams College (B.A.) and the University of Chicago (A.M. & Ph.D.), he was inducted in 1997 by the French government as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques. He is a partner in Cobblestone Films, an independent film and video company.
Haslip-Viera, Gabriel
Department of Sociology and Director of the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies, City College
Gabriel Haslip-Viera is currently an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies at the City College of New York. He was chairperson of the former Department of Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at the City College from 1985 to 1991, and was director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College from September 1997 to January 2000. A specialist in the history of pre-columbian and colonial Mexico and the history of Latino communities in New York City, Dr. Haslip-Viera has lectured extensively on these subjects, and on the relationship between invented racial identities and pseudo-scholarship. His recent publications include Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692-1810 (University of New Mexico Press, 1999); the anthology Taino Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics (Center for Puerto Rican Studies, 1999), the co-edited volume Latinos in New York: Communities in Transition (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), and the co authored journal articles “Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima’s Afrocentricity and the Olmecs,” Current Anthropology, June 1997, and “They Were NOT Here Before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s,” Ethnohistory, Spring 1997.
Hernández, Ramona
Department: Sociology, Director, Dominican Studies Institute, City College
Under Professor Ramona Hernández’s leadership the CUNY DSI has greatly expanded its Dominican Library and has launched its Dominican Archives, which holds possibly the only collection of Dominican colonial documents in the U.S. with approximately 110,000 pages of manuscripts from 16th century La Española (today’s Dominican Republic). In 2011-2013 Dr. Hernández led an NEH-funded research project that produced the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool, the only interactive online platform in the world devoted to teaching the deciphering and reading of the handwriting styles of manuscripts from the early-modern Spanish-language world. Visit the tool. Read the White Paper about the Tool’s functioning and its reception by the scholarly community.
Another interactive online project currently under her direction, First Blacks in the Americas, will feature new archival manuscripts, maps and photographs to tell the story of the first generations of Black Africans and their descendants to inhabit the Americas (in La Española) after Columbus.
López, Iris
Department of Sociology, City College
Iris López is Professor of Sociology and currently co-Director of the Program in Latin American and Latino Studies at City College. An invited speaker, consultant and board member, Professor López completed her Bachelors degree at New York University in literature in 1975, and earned her Masters and Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia University in 1980 and 1985. She is a specialist in Latino/a gender and educational issues, pre-natal care, and sterilization abuse.
Renique, Gerardo
Department of History, City College
Gerardo Renique is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the City College of the City University of New York. He completed his undergraduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Agraria, Lima, Peru where he obtained a B.S. in agronomy. He received a M.A. and a Ph.D in history from Columbia University in 1983 and 1990 respectively.
Professor Rénique’s research has focused on the modern and contemporary history of Peru and Mexico. His book Peru Time of Fear (Latin America Bureau: London, 1992).
Silber, Irina Carlota
Ungar, Mark
Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College
Mark Ungar is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He is author of Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America (Lynne Rienner, 2002), co-editor of Violence and Politics: Globalization’s Paradox (Routledge, 2001) and several articles and book chapters on constitutionalism, crime, and related issues. Currently, he is writing on a book on police reform, and is working with human rights groups in Venezuela and Peru to organize national dialogues on the next stage of judicial reform.
Valdés, Vanessa K.
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, City College
García Colón, Ismael
Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, College of Staten Island
Ismael García Colón joined the College of Staten Island as an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Fall of 2006. He obtained his B.A., Magna Cum Laude, in Anthropology from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut in 2002. Previously, García Colón worked at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY (1999-2003, 2005-2006), and taught Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean studies at Rutgers University (2003-2005). His academic experiences range from documenting the history of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in New York and New Jersey to interviewing former landless workers in Puerto Rico. García Colón is currently researching and writing on power and state formation in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican farmworkers in the U.S. Northeast. His areas of interest are historical and political anthropology, oral history, political economy, and Caribbean, Latin American and Latina/o studies.
Marcus-Delgado, Jane
Jane Department of Spanish and International Studies, College of Staten Island
Jane Marcus-Delgado is Assistant Professor of Spanish and International Studies at the College of Staten Island. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in International Relations from the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University (1989, 1999), and her B.A. degree in Romance Languages and English Literature from the University of Chicago (1983). Her research interests include presidential legitimacy and the politics of economic reform concentrating primarily on Argentina and Peru. She currently studies the political consequences of radical neoliberal reform programs, focusing on corruption and other challenges to democracy.
She has been an affiliated researcher with the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in Lima, as well as an election observer with the Organization of American States in Nicaragua and Transparencia in Peru. Prior to joining the CSI faculty, Professor Marcus-Delgado was an associate at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. She was previously an officer of the Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities (LASPAU) where she worked with the Fulbright Program in Central America (1991-1994), and an administrator of the Nuevo Instituto de CentroAmérica in Estelí, Nicargua (1988-1990).
Arenal, Electa
Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures
Electa Arenal, Latinamericanist, professor of Hispanic literatures, and translator, is one of the pioneers of Women’s Studies and a leading Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz scholar. A member of the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, the Master in Liberal Studies, and the Women’s Studies Certificate Program of City University of New York [CUNY]/Graduate Center, she also taught, 1968-97, at CUNY’s College of Staten Island. A specialist in colonial literature and women’s monastic culture, she is co-author of three books in the field: Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works; Cultura conventual femenina. Obras completas de sor Marcela de San Félix, la hija de Lope de Vega [Women’s Convent Culture: Complete Works of S.M.S.F., daughter of L.de V.]; and the bilingual, annotated edition of Sor Juana Inés de Cruz, The Answer/La Respuesta, including a Selection of Poems. She has published essays on Sor Juana and other monastic women, and on the work of twentieth century Central American writers Claribel Alegría, Gioconda Belli, and Carmen Naranjo.
Professor Arenal helped found women’s studies at Richmond College (now the College of Staten Island) CUNY in the early 1970’s. From 1992-94 she was Director of Research at the Center for Feminist Research in the Humanities at the University of Bergen, Norway, and from 1997-2000, Director, Center for the Study of Women and Society and Coordinator, Women’s Studies Certificate Program at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
An NEH and Bunting Institute Fellow, 1989-90 she has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation’s US-Mexico Cultural Fund, and from the PSC-CUNY Faculty Award Program for her current project, a book and interactive on-line program, Sor Juana’s Arch/El arco de Sor Juana.
Besse, Susan
Department of History, City College; Ph.D. Program in History, Graduate Center
Susan Besse (Yale University, Ph.D., 1983) is an Associate Professor of History at the City College and Graduate Center. Her areas of specialization are modern Brazil and the history of women/gender and nation-building. She has published a book entitled Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which has been translated into Portuguese and published by the Editora da Universidad de Sao Paulo. Several of her articles and her current work explore questions of gender, race, and nation-building in Brazil. At the City College, she is also Director of City College Fellowships Program, which supports undergraduates who seek to enter Ph.D. programs.
Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, City College; Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, Graduate Center
Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Ph.D. New York University, 1973, is Distinguished Professor of Spanish-American literature and culture at the Graduate Center and The City College (CCNY) of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she served as Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (1995-00). She has held visiting appointments at Colgate University (Colgate Professor of the Humanities) and Columbia University.
Among other books, Chang-Rodríguez has written La apropiación del signo: tres cronistas indígenas del Perú (Arizona State University, 1988), El discurso disidente: ensayos de literatura colonial peruana (Catholic University of Peru, 1991), and Hidden Messages: Representation and Resistance in Andean Colonial Drama (1999, Bucknell University Press). She has published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters in journals and collections from Europe and the Americas, and has contributed to major national and international projects such as Latin American Writers (Scribner’s, 1989), History of Literature in the Caribbean (John Benjamins, 1994), Diccionario Enciclopédico de las Letras de América Latina (Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1995), the Encyclopedia of Latin American History (Scribner’s, 1996), the Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Art History and Archaeology (National Gallery of Art, in press), Storia della civilta letteraria ispanoamericana (Torino, UTET, 2000) and the Stori della letteratura ispanoamericana (Rome, La Nuova Italia Scientifica, in press). In 1994 she was the guest editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, dedicated to contemporary women writers from Latin America. Professor Chang-Rodríguez is the founder and general editor of Colonial Latin American Review, the prize winning journal devoted to studying the colonial period from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Raquel Chang-Rodríguez’s research projects have been supported by the Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, The Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, the New York Council for the Humanities, the Organization for American States, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) which awarded her a fellowship. Professor Chang-Rodríguez has served on the advisory board of Revista Iberoamericana, and now serves as board member of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, Ciberletras, Inti. From 1997-2000, she was the President of the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana (IILI), an organization she had presided previously. A frequent key-note speaker at conferences and symposia, Chang- Rodríguez is the co-anchor of Charlando con Cervantes, a program of interviews with prominent personalities sponsored by CUNY-TV and the Instituto Cervantes. She is an Honorary Associate of the Hispanic Society of America. Her latest research project centers on the representation of women in colonial Peru.
Chazkel, Amy
Department of History, Queens College, Ph.D. Program in History, Graduate Center
Amy Chazkel is Associate Professor of History at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011).
Chazkel is also the winner of the New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Prize, co-winner of the J. Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association, and recipient of Honorable Mention for the Best Book Prize of the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Laws of Chance will be published in Portuguese translation in Brazil by Editora da Unicamp. Other publications include articles on penal institutions, illicit gambling, forced labor in post-colonial Brazil and co-edited issues of the Radical History Review that explore the privatization of common property in global perspective and Haitian history. She has held faculty fellowships and visiting scholar positions at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, the Institute for Latin American Studies/ Center for Brazilian Studies at Columbia, the Center for the Humanities, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Last but not least the Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais/ Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the Graduate Program in History at the Universidade Federal da Santa Catarina. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective. Her projects in progress include a co-edited anthology of primary sources on the history of Rio de Janeiro and research for a book that explores the social, cultural, and legal history of nighttime in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.
Colburn, Forrest D.
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College; Ph.D./M.A. program in Political Science, Graduate Center
Forrest D. Colburn is a professor in the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Lehman College and in the Ph.D./M.A. program in Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He has been at a professor at CUNY since 1997. In the spring of 2001, Professor Colburn served as a visiting professor at New York University (NYU); in the spring of 1999 he served as a visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Forrest Colburn taught at Princeton University in the Department of Politics from 1985-1993 and at the Woodrow Wilson School from 1995-1997. Professor Forrest Colburn has long been associated, too, with one of Latin America’s premier schools of business, INCAE, where he has intermittently taught and participated in research projects. Professor Forrest Colburn did his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received a B.A. in economics in 1978. He studied government, agricultural development, and economics at Cornell University. He received from Cornell University an M.A. in government in 1980 and a Ph.D. in government in 1983. Professor Forrest Colburn’s first two books were studies of the Nicaragua Revolution. Post-Revolutionary Nicaragua: State, Class, and the Dilemmas of Agrarian Policy was published by the University of California Press in 1986. Managing the Commanding Heights: Nicaragua’s State Enterprises was published by the University of California Press in 1990. A collection of occasional articles on the Nicaraguan Revolution was published by the University of Texas Press in 1991 under the title My Car in Managua. The work is in its fourth paperback printing, and it has been translated and published in Managua, with a preface written by Sergio Ramírez. From the particulars of the Nicaraguan Revolution, Professor Colburn turned to a comparative study of revolution in poor countries. Through a Fulbright grant, he served as a visiting professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. He also visited Cuba and Vietnam. In 1994, Princeton University Press published his study, The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries. Work for INCAE, much of which involved travel throughout Latin America, underpins Professor Colburn’s most recent book, Latin America at the End of Politics, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Professor Forrest Colburn is a frequent contributor to Dissent and to other magazines and journals.
Edelman, Marc
Department of Anthropology, Hunter College; Ph.D. Program in Anthropology, Graduate Center
Marc Edelman has a joint appointment as Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He did his first two years of undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and then dropped out of college to travel in Mexico and Central and South America. He finished his B.A. in Anthropology at Columbia in 1975. He later obtained a Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia in 1985. Edelman was Research Director of the North American Congress on Latin America in 1985-87 and served on the faculty at Yale in 1987-94. He came to CUNY in 1994. He has also taught or been a visiting researcher at the University of Costa Rica, Tashkent State University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Columbia, and Princeton.
Professor Edelman has longstanding interests in development issues, environmental and agrarian problems, and social movements, particularly among peasants and small farmers. He is the author of The Logic of the Latifundio: The Large Estates of Northwestern Costa Rica since the Late Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press, 1992; Spanish edition Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1998), which explains the persistence of large underutilized properties in a modern export economy in relation to histories of elite families, state development policies, successive export booms, and landowners’ pursuit of “institutional rents” and involvement in national politics. His latest book, Peasants Against Globalization: Rural Social Movements in Costa Rica (Stanford University Press, 1999), examines smallholding agriculturalists’ struggles against economic structural adjustment policies in the 1980s and 1990s. It provides a succinct critique of “new social movements,” “postdevelopment” and “post-peasant” theories of social change, as well as an analysis of the ethical and methodological dilemmas of “engaged” ethnography.
Edelman has also edited or contributed to several other volumes: The Costa Rica Reader (Grove, 1989, edited with Joanne Kenen), Amérique Centrale (a special 1989 issue of Les Temps Modernes edited with Philippe Bourgois), and Ciencia social en Costa Rica: Experiencias de vida e investigación (Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1998, co-authored by Fabrice Lehoucq, Steven Palmer, and Iván Molina). For the past several years, Professor Edelman has been involved in research on the role of peasant and small farmer activist networks in global movements against unfettered free trade. This and other research has taken him to destinations throughout Central America, as well as to Mexico, Cuba, the United States, and Western Europe. He has served on the editorial boards of Critique of Anthropology, Culture & Agriculture, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Latin American Research Review, and NACLA Report on the Americas. He has held grants and fellowships from a number of sources, including the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Erickson, Kenneth Paul
Department of Political Science, Hunter College; Ph.D. Program in Political Science, Graduate Center
Kenneth Paul Erickson is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He currently serves on the executive or advisory committees of Hunter’s Department of Political Science, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and Energy and Environmental Policy Studies Program; of the Ph.D. Program in Political Science at the Graduate Center; and of the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS). He is Co-Managing Editor of the journal, Comparative Politics.
Professor Erickson holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Political Science and a Certificate in Latin American Studies from Columbia University. His courses and research interests focus on comparative and international politics in Latin America, and on related policy issues, principally involving energy, environment, narcotics, and human rights:
- Latin American Politics
- Central American Politics
- International Politics in the Americas
- Social Movements, Citizenship, and the State in Latin America
- Drugs, Politics, and Public Policy
- Energy and Environmental Politics and Policy
- Introduction to Comparative Politics.
Professor Erickson has researched in Latin America on Fulbright and other grants, with his principal work in and on Brazil. Most recently, in 1997, he taught and researched as a Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellow at the Center for the Study of Violence of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His book, The Brazilian Corporative State and Working-Class Politics (University of California Press, 1977), won the Hubert Herring Memorial Award of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies. His most recent publication is “Drugs,” in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, 2nd ed. Eds. Joel Krieger, et al. (Oxford University Press, 2001).
kerickso@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu
Farber, Samuel
Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College; Ph.D. Program in Sociology, Graduate Center
Samuel Farber was born and raised in Marianao, Cuba. He obtained a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 1961, an M. Sc. (Econ) in Political Sociology from The London School of Economics (University of London) in 1963 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969. He is currently a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and also teaches Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published numerous articles on a variety of topics including Cuba and is the author of three books: Revolution and Reaction in Cuba. 1933-1960. A Political Sociology from Machado to Castro (Wesleyan University Press, 1976); Before Stalinism. The Rise and Decline of Soviet Democracy (Polity Press/Basil Blackwell [U.K.] and Verso [USA],1990); and Social Decay and Transformation. A View From the Left (Lexington Books, 2000).
Filer, Malva E.
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Brooklyn College, Ph. D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature, Graduate Center
Malva E. Filer, born in Argentina, holds a B. A. from the School of Philosophy and Literature of the National University of Buenos Aires 1958) and a Ph. D. from Columbia University (1966). She is a Professor and Deputy Chair at the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures of Brooklyn College, and a faculty member of the Ph. D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures at the Graduate Center, CUNY, since 1988.
Prof. Filer’s research and publications focus on the Spanish American prose fiction, essay, literary movements and criticism from the 1960s to the present. She has published books on Julio Cortázar and on Antonio Di Benedetto, co-authored, with Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Voces de Hispanoamérica. Antología Literaria, has numerous essays included in volumes on Borges, Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Sarduy, and in other special collections, as well as many articles in literary journals.
Prof. Filer serves on the Editorial Boards of Revista Hispánica Moderna (Columbia University), North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature (Kansas State University), Inti and Alba de América.
Font, Maurico
Department of Sociology, Queens College; Ph.D. Program in Sociology, Graduate Center; Director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies
Mauricio Font is Professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center and is Director of the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies and Cuba Project. Has worked extensively on Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, settler societies, and Latin America as a whole. His publications include Transforming Brazil (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, forthcoming); To Craft a New Course (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Toward a New Cuba? (Lynne Rienner, 1996, co-edited with M. Centeno), Integración Económica y Democratización: América Latina y Cuba (University of Chile, 1998; co-editor); Coffee, Contention and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1991). Has taught at Rutgers and the University of Michigan – as well as at the University of Brasilia, UNESP and IUPERJ in Brazil, under awards from the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Program.
Gottlieb, Marlene
Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, Graduate Center, Emeriti Lehman
Marlene Gottlieb has been a professor of Latin American literature at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center since 1967. She completed her undergraduate work at Hunter College (CUNY) and her Master’s and Ph.D. at Columbia University. She is the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. Her areas of specialization are Modernism and contemporary Spanish American poetry, with an emphasis on Chilean poetry. She is the author of five books: No se termina nunca de nacer: La poesía de Nicanor Parra (Madrid: Playor, 1977); El Burlador de Sevilla of Francisco Villaespesa, critical edition, (Seville: Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas,1986); Nicanor Parra: Antes y Después de Jesucristo (Critical Anthology Princeton: Linden Lane Press, 1993); Las revistas modernistas de Francisco Villaespesa (Critical Edition Granada: Editorial Anel, 1995); Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra Face To Face Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). She has published numerous articles on the poetry of Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Nicanor Parra, Heberto Padilla, Enrique Lihn, and Pedro Mir.
Hammond, John L. (Jack)
Department of Sociology, Hunter College, Ph.D. Program in Sociology, Graduate Center
John L. Hammond (Jack) is professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. He is director of the Hunter College Human Rights Program. He received his B.A. from Harvard College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. After teaching at Columbia University, he joined the CUNY faculty in 1977. His current research is on the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Farmworkers’ Movement) and on the use of social science in human rights research and practice.
He is the author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador (Rutgers University Press, 1998); Building Popular Power: Workers’ and Neighborhood Movements in the Portuguese Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1988); and The Politics of Benevolence: Revival Religion and American Voting Behavior (Ablex Publishing Corp., 1979).
He has received research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation. In 1996 he was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Violence (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência ) at the University of São Paulo. In 2000-01 he was a fellow in Teaching Human Rights Law at the Columbia Law School.
He is a participating editor of Latin American Perspectives and a member of the Editorial Board of NACLA Report on the Americas.
During the 1980s he was active in the movement against US intervention in Central America. He worked as a consultant to the Regional Government of Region I, Nicaragua, and was a volunteer at the Nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador. He has also served as an interpreter and expert witness on behalf of political asylum applicants. He is presently chair of the LASA Task Force on Human Rights and Academic Freedom.
Hart, Roger
Environmental and Developmental Psychology Programs and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program, Graduate Center
Professor Roger Hart’s areas of interested are development of theory and research on children’s relationship to the physical environment; application of research to the planning and design of children’s environments and to environmental education; more broadly concerned with developing theory, research and programs which foster the greater participation of young people in articulating their perspectives and concerns as a way of better fulfilling their rights; Director of the Children’s Environments Research Group.
Indych-López, Anna
Art Department, City College, Art History, Graduate Center
Professor Anna Indych-López specializes in the modern art of Latin America, specifically Mexico. Her work focuses on exhibition culture, cross-cultural perceptions, reception analysis, and the relationship between art and politics. She received the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for her book Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927-1940 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). In 2011, she co-authored with Leah Dickerman Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, the book accompanying the exhibition with the same title at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Leon, Tania
Ph.D. Program in Music, Graduate Center and Music, Brooklyn College
Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba), a vital personality on today’s music scene, in demand as composer and conductor, has been recognized for her significant accomplishments as an educator and advisor to arts organizations.
Duende, for Baritone, Bata drums and Percussion premiered September 2003 at the Fest der Kontinente in Berlin, Germany. Commissioned by the Fest in honor of Gyorgy Ligeti s 80th birthday.
León’s opera Scourge of Hyacinths, staged and designed by Robert Wilson with León conducting, has received 22 performances in Germany, Switzerland, France and Mexico. Based on a radio play by Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka it was commissioned in 1994 by the Munich Biennale, where it won the BMW Prize as best new opera. The aria “Oh Yemanja” from Scourge was recorded by Dawn Upshaw on her Nonesuch CD “The World So Wide”.
In Spring 2005, León joined forces again with Wole Soyinka to create a new work for the inauguration of the Shaw Center for the Performing Arts in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Virginia Arts Festival has invited León to serve as composer in residence for the first annual John Duffy Composers Institute.
León’s orchestral work Desde… (2001) was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall. Horizons (1999) commissioned and premiered by the NDR Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg. Subsequent performances at the 2000 Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival and Nancy Symphony, France, 2002. Drummin’ , a full-length cross-cultural work for indigenous percussionists and orchestra, commissioned and premiered in 1997 by Miami Light Project and the New World Symphony opened the 1999 Hammoniale Festival, Hamburg.
Her music is available on Nonesuch, Teldec, CRI, Albany, Quindecim, Newport Classic, Leonarda, Mode and First Edition Records.
She was awarded the 1998 New York Governor s Lifetime Achievement Award and held the Fromm Residency at the American Academy in Rome. She has received Honorary Doctorates from Colgate University and Oberlin College and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, NYSCA, Lila Wallace/Reader s Digest Fund, ASCAP and Koussevitzky Foundation, among others.
León, founding member and first Music Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem established their Music Department, Music School and Orchestra. She instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series in 1978. In 1994 she co-founded the American Composers Orchestra Sonidos de las Americas Festivals. She served as New Music Advisor to Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic (1993-97).
She has been guest conductor with the Madrid Symphony, Gewandhausorchester, Leipzig, Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Rome, Marseille Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra of South Africa, Johannesburg, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, and New York Philharmonic, among others.
Tania León has been the subject of profiles on ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS, Univision and independent films.
León was Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, Visiting Professor at Yale University and the Musikschule in Hamburg. In 2000 she was named the Tow Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College, where she has taught since 1985.
Low, Setha
Ph.D. Program in Environmental Psychology and Anthropology, Graduate Center
Setha M. Low is Professor of Environmental Psychology and Anthropology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent her early career as Assistant and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, and City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania where she became interested in cultural aspects of design and the anthropology of space and place. She has published extensively including On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (2000, University of Texas Press), Theorizing the City (edited,1999, Rutgers University Press), Children of the Urban Poor: Sociocultural Development in Guatemala City (with F. J. Johnston, 1995, Westview Press), Place Attachment (edited with I. Altman, 1992, Plenum Publishing), Housing, Culture, and Design (edited with E. Chambers,1989, University of Pennsylvania Press), as well Culture, Politics and Medicine in Costa Rica (1985, Gordon and Beach).
Professor Low has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship a Fulbright Research Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, The Canadian Social Research Council, and the National Science Foundation. On November 18, 2000, she was awarded the Textor Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, a national career award.
Setha Low is writing and lecturing about gated communities, editing a volume entitled Cultural Spaces for Blackwell Publishers with Denise Lawrence, and completing a book on Creating Cultural Spaces for the University of Texas Press. She continues to be interested in the politics of public space both in New York City and East Hampton. As Director of the Public Space Research Group at the Center for Human Environments (CUNY) she has completed studies of cultural diversity in New York City and National Park Service parks, and consults on cultural values in historic preservation for the Getty Institute in Los Angeles and Municipal Arts Society of New York City.
Manthorne, Katherine
Ph.D. Program in Art History, Graduate Center
Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Art of the Americas at the Graduate Center. She focuses on nineteenth-century Latin America, the United States, and border crossings between them. Her books and exhibition publications include Creation & Renewal. Vies of Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church (Washington, DC, 1985); Tropical Renaissance. North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879 (Washington, D.C. 1989); The Landscapes of Louis Rémy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad (North Carolina, 1996) with John Coffey; El Barón de Courcy. Ilustraciones de un viaje, 1831-1833 (Mexico City, 1998) with Pablo Diener. She was also a contributing author in The Art of Juan Manuel Blanes (Buenos Aires, 1994) and Paisaje Americano. Explorar el Eden (Madrid, 2000).
She has been the recipient of various grants and awards including a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship. Prior to her arrival at CUNY in January 2000, she was head of the Resident Research Center in American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and Executive Editor of its journal American Art; previously she was Chairperson of the Art History Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her Ph.D. working with Barbara Novak in the Art History and Archaeology Dept., Columbia University.
Manuel, Peter
Ph.D. Program in Music, Graduate Center, Music, John Jay
Peter Manuel has written extensively about popular and traditional musics of India, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Three of his books have earned prestigious awards. An amateur sitarist, jazz pianist, and flamenco guitarist, he teaches seminars on Indian music, Latin American music, world popular music, aesthetics, and other topics.
Contreras, Eduardo
Department of History, Hunter College
Eduardo Contreras is a Ph.D., The University of Chicago 2008.
Teaching interests:
- The United States since 1865; U.S. Latino Histories; U.S. Political History; History of Sexuality
Research interests:
- Twentieth-century U.S. history; U.S. Latinos; urban politics; race and ethnicity; feminist/queer communities; liberalism and conservatism
Selected Publications:
- Latinos in the Liberal City: Politics in San Francisco from the General
Strike to Briggs (Manuscript In Progress)
López Adorno, Pedro
Department of Africana/Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College
Pedro López Adorno is a Puerto Rican poet, novelist, literary critic, and anthologist. His maternal grandmother brought him to New York in 1965 and he has lived here ever since. He received his PhD from NYU in 1982. He has been teaching at the college level since 1980 and at Hunter College since 1987. His areas of expertise are Latin American poetry; contemporary Caribbean literature in Spanish; Puerto Rican literature from colonial times to the present; Latino literature in the US; and literary criticism and theory related to the above.
As a poet, he is considered a key voice within the generation of Latin American poets born after 1950. Author of thirteen books, his most recent are: La ciudad prestada/Poesía latinoamericana posmoderna en Nueva York (2002), Arte de cenizas/Poesía escogida/1991-1999 (2004), and Opera ardiente (2009). His work, which fuses neobaroque and postmodern elements, is included in a number of important anthologies such as: El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (1997), Nueva Poesía Latinoamericana (1999), Entre Rascacielos/Amidst Skyscrapers (Twelve Hispanic Poets in New York) (2000), and Una gravedad alegre, Antología de la poesía latinoamericana al siglo XXI (2007). His first volume of poetry in English, Against Abluvion, remains unpublished. He is currently working on two new volumes of poetry, a selection of personal and critical essays, and a novel.
Meléndez, Edgardo
Department of Africana/Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College
Edgardo Meléndez earned his PH.D. in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1985. He also has a M. Phil. in Political Science from the City University of New York (1981) and a B.A. in the Social Sciences University of Puerto Rico (1976).
Prof. Melendez was a Full Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras. He has also taught at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, Lehman College-CUNY, and City College-CUNY, among other colleges.
His publications include Puerto Rican Government and Politics: A Comprehensive Bibliography (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000, awarded the 2000 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine); Partidos, política pública y status en Puerto Rico (Ediciones Nueva Aurora, 1998); Puerto Rico en “Patria” (Editorial Edil, 1996); Movimiento anexionista en Puerto Rico (University of Puerto Rico Press, 1993); Colonial Dilemma: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Puerto Rico, co-edited with Edwin Meléndez(South End Press, 1993); and Puerto Rico’s Statehood Movement (Greenwood Press, 1988).
He has also been published in academic journals like Centro Journal (Center for Puerto Rican Studies, CUNY); Revista de Ciencias Sociales (Puerto Rico); Revista de Administración Pública de Puerto Rico; Homines (Puerto Rico); Caribbean Studies; and Radical America, among others.
He is currently writing a book on Puerto Rican Migration and Politics in Puerto Rico and the United States, 1940-1950.
His academic and research interests include Puerto Rican and Latino Politics in the United States, and Politics in Puerto Rico.
Roldan, Mary
Department of History, Hunter College
Torres-Vélez, Victor
Department of Africana/Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College
Barrios, Luis
Professor, Department of Latin American and Latina/o Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Luiz Barrios is a Board Certified Forensic Examiner and a professor of Latina/o psychology; Latin American studies; ethnic studies; qualitative research and methodology; and cultural criminology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Professor, Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies-John Jay College of Criminal Justice and member of Ph.D. faculties in social/personality psychology, Graduate Center-City University of New York. Since 1988, Dr. Barrios is a columnist of El Diario La Prensa in New York City, one of the oldest Spanish newspapers in the United States.
He is the co-editor with Louis Kontos and David C. Brotherton of Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspective (2003-Columbia University); co-author with David C. Brotherton of Almighty Latin King & Queen Nation: Street Politics and the Transformation of a New York City Gang (2004-Columbia University); and co-editor with Dr. Mauro Cerbino of Otras naciones: Jóvenes, transnacionalismo y exclusión. Quito: Ecuador: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. Dr. Barrios is also the author of Josconiando: Dimensiones Sociales y políticas de la espiritualidad (2000-Editorial Aguiar), Pitirreando: De la desesperanza a la esperanza (2004-Editorial Edil) and Coquiando: Meditaciones subversivas para un mundo mejor (2008-Editorial Búho).
Martínez, Isabel
Department of Latin American and Latina/o Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Isabel Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latina/o Studies. She earned her doctorate in Sociology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in Sociology from Rice University. Her teaching and research interests include the life courses of Latina/o adult and youth immigrants and the intersections of Latina/o immigration, education and technology.
Her article, “What’s Age Gotta Do With It? Understanding the Age-Identities and School-Going Practices of Mexican Immigrant Youth in New York City” was published in a special issue of The High School Journal focusing on Transnationalism, Latina/o Immigrants and Education, and she has a forthcoming chapter on the US-Mexico border in Latinas/os and Criminal Justice: An Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press), scheduled for release in 2013. She is currently a Digital Humanities Initiative Fellow at Hamilton College and a McNair Faculty Fellow, and has received fellowships and grants from the American Education Research Association, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, the Association of Black Sociologists, the Spencer Foundation, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her dissertation was also honored as a finalist in the 2011-2012 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education/Educational Testing Services Outstanding Dissertation Competition.
Most recently, she is working on several projects including, with the support of the Deutsche Bank of Americas Foundation and in collaboration with various community and educational partners, the design of an educational program that would serve unaccompanied, out-of-school Mexican immigrant teenagers, and with partners in the United States, Mexico and Canada and the support of the PIERAN, or the Programa Interinstitucional de Estudios sobre la Región de América del Norte, a research project that examines the educational and labour expectations of Mexican immigrant young adults, post-NAFTA.
She recently received a PSC-CUNY grant to begin research on the impact of detention and deportation on the life courses of unaccompanied Mexican immigrant minors in New York and Texas and the 2012 John Jay Distinguished Teaching Award. She will be on fellowship leave in 2013-2014 as a Woodrow Wilson National Foundation Fellow to complete her manuscript examining the life courses of unaccompanied, out-of-school Mexican immigrant youth living in New York City, tentatively entitled “Making Transnational Workers from Youth: Mexican Teenagers in Search of the Mexican Dream.” She serves on several executive boards, including the CUNY Institute Mexican Studies and Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture without Borders.
Oboler, Susan
Department of Latin American and Latino/a Studies, John Jay College
Pérez, Lisandro
Department of Latin American and Latina/o Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Roure, Jodie
Department of Latin American and Latina/o Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Tovar, Patricia
Department of Anthropology, John Jay College
Badillo, David
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College
David A. Badillo, Associate Professor in Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, writes on U.S. Latino history; his teaching interests also include Mexican migration, Puerto Rican history, and Caribbean music. He has published Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) as well as over than fifteen journal articles and chapters in edited volumes on themes encompassing religion, urbanization, and civil rights. During the Spring 2012 semester he will present three conference papers on his current book project, “In the Shadow of the Courts,” which focuses on legal advocacy and landmark court cases dealing with Mexican-American education, voting, immigration, and alienage. The venues are “Siglo XXI: Forging the Future of Latinos in a Time of Crisis,” a biennial conference event sponsored by the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR)—in New York City, February 23-25; a symposium of the Commission for the Study of the History of the Church in Latin America (CEHILA, USA)—at the University of Notre Dame in late April; and the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association (LSA)—early June in Honolulu, Hawaii. Later that month, as a visiting faculty member of the Hispanic Summer Program, he will teach a graduate course at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce, Puerto Rico.
Bergad, Laird W.
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College; Ph.D. Program in History, Graduate Center
Laird W. Bergad is a Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history in the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College and the Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A member of CUNY’s faculty since 1980, he has served as Director of Lehman College’s interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Chair of the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, and on the Executive Committees of the CUNY/Cuba (and later Caribbean) Scholarly Exchange Program as well as on the CUNY-University of Puerto Rico Exchange. Professor Bergad is the founding and current director of the CUNY Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies.
He did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin where he received a B.A. degree in History in 1970. An M.A. was completed at the University of Pittsburgh in 1974 and a Ph.D. was conferred in Latin American and Caribbean history in 1980.
Professor Bergad’s research interests have revolved around the social, economic, and demographic history of slave-based plantation societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. His first book, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Princeton University Press, 1983), was based upon previously unutilized documentary materials housed at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. This work revised the analytical framework for understanding Puerto Rican history prior to the United States occupation and annexation of 1898 by systematically demonstrating that the island’s economic structure had made the transition to a fully developed market economy during the 19th century.
He was one of the first foreign scholars to be granted unrestricted access to Cuban historical archives during the early 1980s, and his work there resulted in the publication of two books. The first, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton University Press, 1990), is a detailed examination of the rise and evolution of the sugar plantation economy in the most important sugar-producing region of the world (the Cuban province of Matanzas) during the 19th century.
The second, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
[co-authored with Fe Iglesias García and María Carmen Barcia of the Cuban Institute of History] was the first empirical examination of the demographic and price structure of Cuban slave society during the island’s reign as the Caribbean’s leading sugar-producing and slave importing society.
Professor Bergad turned his attention to Brazil where he began work in 1992 in the historical archives of Brazil’s largest slave-holding province during the 18th and 19th centuries, Minas Gerais. The Demographic and Economic History of Slavery in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) is a detailed study of slavery in Brazil and has been translated into Portuguese as A Escravidão e a História Econômica e Demográfica de Minas Gerais, Brasil, 1720-1888 (São Paulo: EDUSC, 2005).
Prof. Bergad’s also co-authored Hispanics in the United States: A Demographic, Social, and Economic History 1980-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) with Prof. Herbert S. Klein, Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University and Research Fellow and Latin American Curator, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Professor Bergad is nearing completion (March 2016) of a co-authored book titled Puerto Rican Rural Society in the Early Twentieth Century which revises the notion that absentee sugar corporations dominated rural Puerto Rico between 1900 and 1935 and created land alienation and the pauperization of a rural proletariat, among many other themes. This is a major reinterpretation of Puerto Rican history under U.S. rule. He is also writing a social, economic, and demographic history of Latinos in the New York metropolitan area 1900 – 2016.
Professor Bergad has won a number of internationally recognized awards. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1986/87 and won a research grant from the Social Science Research Council in the same years. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in 1992/93 and was awarded a second Fulbright to teach at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain in 2000 (Declined). He also won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 1996 and 1997.
Selected Publications:
Hispanics in the United States: A Demographic, Social, and Economic History, 1980 – 2005 (co-author with Herbert S. Klein) (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Escravidão e História Econômica: Demografía de Minas Gerais,1720-1888 (São Paulo: EDUSC, 2004).
Slavery and the Economic and Demographic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 298 pp.
The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880 (co-author with Fe Iglesias Garcia and Maria del Carmen Barcia) (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Socialand Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton University Press, 1990).
Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in NineteenthCentury Puerto Rico (Princeton University Press, 1983).
Fiol-Matta, Licia
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College
Licia Fiol-Matta’s research has focused on the intersection of gender, culture and nation in twentieth century Latin America, the Caribbean, and the US Latino population. She bridges several fields and employs diverse methodologies, principally archival research, psychoanalytic theory, and discursive analysis. Her work is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on literature, media, and music.
Galvéz, Alyshia
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College
Professor Alyshia Gálvez is a Ph.D., New York Univ. Her research interests are: Religion, migration, performance, citizenship, reproduction, medical anthropology, Latin America, and Latinos in the United States.
Her recent research has focused on Mexican migration to New York City, focusing especially on two main aspects:
- Religiosity and the role of religious organizations in channeling migrant organization and activism
- Pregnancy and childbirth among immigrants and the ways in which they are received by the public health system.
She is the Director of the CUNY Institute of Mexican Studies.
Levy, Teresita
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College
Teresita Levy is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College since 2008. She is Associate Director of CLACLS. Profesore Levy has a B.A., Rollins Coll.; M.S., Long Island Univ.; M.A. and Ph.D., City Univ. of New York.
Her academic interests are Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti. Her research focuses on Tobacco cultivation in early 20th century Puerto Rico, and on the dissemination of scientific material in rural Puerto Rico.
Ricourt, Milagros
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College
Totti, Xavier
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College, Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Torres, Andrés
Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, Lehman College, Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Nunez, Elizabeth
Department of English, Medgar Evers College
Elizabeth Nunez is a Distinguished Professor of English at Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York, where she designed, developed and implemented many of the college’s first major academic programs. She received her Ph.D. (1977) and M.A. (1971) degrees in English from New York University, and her B.A. degree in English from Marian College in Wisconsin. She is the Director of the National Black Writers Conferences (NBWC), sponsored by five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Nunez’s publications include the novels Bruised Hibiscus, Beyond the Limbo Silence, which won the 1999 Independent Publishers Book Award in the multi-cultural fiction category, and When Rocks Dance. Her fourth novel, Discretion, will be published by Ballantine in 2002. She is co-editor of the collection of essays Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the 90s, and author of several literary monographs. Nunez chairs the PEN American Open Book committee, which focuses on providing access for people of color to various aspects of the publishing industry. She has served as an evaluator for national and local programs in the arts and education and has raised over $10 million dollars in grants for educational, social and cultural programs in Brooklyn, New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Vera Rubin Residency Fellowship for the Yaddo Artists Colony, the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Black Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, and the Carter G. Woodson Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Marian College, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, for her contributions to education and the arts.
Fernandes, Sujatha
Department of Sociology, Queens College
Sujatha Fernandes is Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 2003. She has taught classes on Social Theory, Latin American politics, Caribbean politics and society, and cultural politics. Her research interests include hip hop culture; neoliberalism; state-society relations; urban public space; and the role of culture in social movements; with an area focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. Dr Fernandes has been the recipient of various fellowships, including a Wilson-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2003-2006) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center (2007-2008). In 2008, she was awarded the Feliks Gross Award from the CUNY Academy for Arts and Sciences in recognition of outstanding research. She is currently a mid-career Mellon Faculty Fellow at the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Dr. Fernandes is the author of Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press, October 2006) and Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press, April 2010). Her most recent book is Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation (Verso, September 2011).
Vazquez, Jesse M.
Department of Graduate Educational and Community Programs, Queens College
Jesse M. Vazquez is Professor and Chair of the department of Graduate Educational and Community Programs at Queens College. Since 1975, he has served as Director of the college’s Puerto Rican Studies Program. Professor Vazquez is a founding Council member of the Puerto Rican Studies Association as well as Past President, past Vice President, and current board member of the National Association for Ethnic Studies. He was also a founding member of the advisory board of the CUNY – University of Puerto Rico Exchange Program (Center for Puerto Rican Studies), and an early and consistent participant in a New York statewide group of Latino educators called the Puerto Rican Council for Higher Education (PRCHE). This group was gradually transformed into a CUNY approved disciplinary group for Puerto Rican and Latino Studies.
After taking an undergraduate B. A. degree in sociology/anthropology, with a concentration in psychology, Professor Vazquez completed his Master in Science degree in 1967 in counseling at New York University. He then received his doctoral degree in counseling in 1975, also from New York University. His doctoral dissertation focused on the measurement and significance of ethnic (Puerto Rican) identity and its impact on the development of rapport in the counseling process.
For the past twenty five years, Professor Vazquez has continued to explore issues of ethnicity and culture in education and the teaching process and engaged in a series of activities which sought to integrate some of these ideas into university policies and practices, and in the curriculum. In the early 1980’s, together with a co-principal investigator, he won a grant from the US Department of Education under Title VII of the Secondary Education Act. This grant permitted Queens College to begin its first effort in training teachers in bilingual-multicultural education. In 1982, Professor Vazquez was awarded an individual fellowship grant from the Fund for Post Secondary Education – The Mina Shaugnessy Scholars Award. Professor Vazquez was also a participant co-developer in the College’s initial Mellon Grant (1987-88) that supported the development of the World Studies curriculum. Collaborative work with colleagues in Latin American Studies (G. Priestley) and Africana Studies (A. Habtu) won Queens College funding support, which enabled us to organize and launch a seminar series in Caribbean Studies. The CUNY-Caribbean Exchange Program funded the series in 1993. In 1995-96, Professor Vazquez, with faculty from the Queens College Asian/American Center and Urban Studies, and with support from the Aaron Diamond Foundation and CUNY, launched an interdisciplinary community-oriented pilot project called the Neighborhood Studies Program. From 1994 to 1996, he worked as a Co-Principal Investigator with S. Aronowitz, R. Bologh, and F. Kirkland (and earlier with Edmond Gordon and Frank Bonilla) in a Ford Foundation project, which sought to develop and establish a doctoral program in Intercultural Studies at the Graduate Center. This consortium included wide support and participation from CUNY faculty and graduate students from six interdisciplinary areas of study.
Professor Vazquez’s publications, among others, include some of the following titles: “Puerto Ricans and the counseling process: The dynamics of ethnicity and its societal context; The myths and tired old clichés about ethnic studies” (Chronicle of Higher Education); Education and community: Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the schools and universities; Embattled scholars in the academy: A shared odyssey; The public debate over multiculturalism; Language and ideology; Ethnic studies and the new multiculturalism; The canon and Puerto Rican Studies; The co-opting of ethnic studies in the American university.
Professor Vazquez has taught undergraduate and graduate level courses at Queens College. These include Puerto Rican and Latino ethnic identity; Multicultural issues in psychological counseling; self awareness in counseling; Education and the Puerto Rican and Latino community; Field courses in Bilingual Settings; Group Counseling techniques and theory; individual counseling skills and other courses in Counselor Education as well as in Puerto Rican Studies.
