Faculty

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).

[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).

Silber, Irina Carlota

Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the Center for Worker Education, City College

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.

See more at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements/Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Doctoral-Programs/History/Faculty-Bios/Amy-Chazkel#sthash.N24XZiVz.dpuf


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: 

berg_hitus

Hispanics in the United States: A Demographic, Social, and Economic History, 1980 – 2005 (co-author with Herbert S. Klein) (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

 

 

berg_tchosibcatus

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

Slavery and the Economic and Demographic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 298 pp.

 

 

thecubanslave

The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880 (co-author with Fe Iglesias Garcia and Maria del Carmen Barcia) (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

 

 

 

cubanrural

Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Socialand Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton University Press, 1990).

 

 

 

coffee

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:

  1. Religiosity and the role of religious organizations in channeling migrant organization and activism
  2. 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.