Faculty & Staff >Stanford University Affiliated Faculty in Latin American Studies

The Latin American Studies curriculum at Stanford benefits from the wide-ranging expertise of affiliated faculty from variety of disciplines.

Department of Anthropology

Clifford Barnett, Professor Emeritus, received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1960. His area of specialization is medical anthropology, with an emphasis on field methods and ethics.

George Collier, Professor Emeritus, received his training at the Department of Social Relations, Harvard University. His work concerns the history and anthropology of Spain and Latin America (with an emphasis on Mesoamerica); agrarian stratification in state-level societies; ethnicity, colonialism, and historical consciousness; and the use of demographic and other formal quantitative methods in anthropology. He is the author of Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (revised editions 1999, 2005). Collier was director of the Center for Latin American Studies from 1983-1988.

Lisa Curran, Professor, joined the Stanford faculty in 2009 as the Roger and Cynthia Lang Professor in Environmental Anthropology and as Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. She received her A.B. with honors from Harvard University and Ph.D from Princeton University and held a Mercer Post-doctoral Fellowship at Harvard University. Before coming to Stanford, she previously taught at Yale University (2001-2009) and the University of Michigan (1996-2001). Her current interdisciplinary research examines the effects of land use change, climate, drought and fire on carbon dynamics and biodiversity; and impacts of governmental policies and industrial practices on ecosystems and rural livelihoods in Asian and Latin American tropical forests.

Carolyn Duffey, Lecturer, received her Ph.D from the University of California-Berkeley. She specializes in the study of Francophone and Anglophone women writers from the Caribbean and north and west Africa.

William Durham, Professor, received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1977. His research interests center on Central and South America, and include biological, ecological, and evolutionary anthropology with emphases on conservation and community development, resource management, cultural evolution, and environmental issues.

James A. Fox, Associate Professor, obtained his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Chicago in 1978. His work focuses on Middle and South American native languages and cultures and historical linguistics with ongoing research into the biology and evolution of language, archaeological decipherment, and the settlement of the New World. He is former director of the Center for Latin American Studies.

Dominique Irvine, Consulting Associate Professor, obtained a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford in 1987. Her research includes ecological anthropology, conservation and development, and community and tropical forests in South America.

John Rick, Associate Professor, has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, received in 1978. He researches New World archaeology, with an ongoing focus on the excavations at Chavín de Huantar, Peru. His specific interests include band-level hunter-gatherers, stone tool studies, analytical methodology, and animal domestication.

Ian Robertson, Assistant Professor, earned his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 2001. He is an archaeologist who specializes in the prehispanic cultures of Mesoamerica, particularly Central Mexico. He conducts most of his research at the ancient city of Teotihuacan.

Department of Art & Art History

Barbaro Martinez Ruiz, Assistant Professor, received a Ph.D. from Yale University. Martinez-Ruiz works on the significance of Kongo graphic writing or cosmograms in Congo, Angola, and Cuba.

Department of Biology

Gretchen Daily, Professor, is also the director of the Tropical Research Program at the Center for Conservation Biology and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Studies. She conducts field work in Mexico and Costa Rica on forecasting changes in biodiversity and certain ecosystem services.

Rodolfo Dirzo, Professor, has a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Wales. Formerly at UNAM, Dirzo also directed the Los Tuxtlas Research Station in Montes Azules, Mexico. Dirzo's main field of expertise is tropical ecology and conservation and his primary area of research is ecological interactions. He focuses on the conservation of processes in tropical forests.

Harold A. Mooney, Professor, obtained his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1960. He has worked in such diverse ecosystems as arctic-alpine, Mediterranean-climate scrub and grasslands, tropical wet and dry forests, and deserts. His fieldwork has taken him to Chile and Mexico, and he does much of his current research into the ecological impact of enhanced CO2 at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. He also studies biodiversity.

Peter M. Vitousek, Professor, earned his Ph.D. from Dartmouth College in 1975. His area of specialization is in nutrient cycling in tropical and temperate forests. He has conducted research in Brazil and Costa Rica, and is currently working on a project in Hawaii addressing biological invasion of exotic species and sources of elements during long-term soil and ecosystem development.

Virginia Walbot, Professor, received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1972. Her laboratory studies maize transposons to determine fundamentals of transposon regulation and plant development. She has done much of her research on a particular form of maize native to Mexico.

Department of Comparative Literature

Roland Greene, Professor, received his Ph.D. in 1985 from Princeton University. He is professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Head of Stanford’s Division of Literature, Cultures, and Languages. His research interests include Early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the colonial Americas; transatlantic literature and society; Latin American and Latina/o poetry, fiction, and criticism; and contemporary poetry and poetics.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Professor, earned his Ph.D. from Universitaet Konstanz in 1971. He specializes in the study of French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, and Argentine historical literatures.

Dance Division, Drama Department

Susan Cashion, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, earned her Ph.D. in Education at Stanford University in 1983, and coordinated the Dance Division until 2002. She has traveled to Mexico and Chile on Fulbright fellowships, and has won recognition from the Mexican government for her contributions to Mexican culture and folklore in the United States. She teaches courses on Mexican and Latin American dance.

School of Earth Sciences

Suki Hoagland, Consulting Associate Professor, earned her Ph.D. in International Relations from American University. She specializes in and teaches on the intersection of international development, sustainablilty and the environment. She is associate director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources.

Pamela Matson, Professor of Environmental Studies and Dean of the School of Earth Sciences, obtained her Ph.D. in Forest Ecology from Oregon State University in 1983. She specializes in the study of biogeochemical cycling and trace gas emissions from forest and agricultural ecosystems as impacted by anthropogenic and natural disturbances. She also researches the economic, social, and environmental roots and consequences of land use. She is also a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Institute of International Studies.

Department of Economics

Roger Noll, Professor Emeritus, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967. His research interests include public policies toward business, political behavior, legal processes, and rational actor models of public policy formation. He teaches on antitrust and regulation, the economic approach to politics, and the role and methods of economic policy analysis. He is director of the Stanford Center for International Development and a senior fellow at SIEPR.

School of Education

Martin Carnoy, Professor, received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1964. He is a labor economist with research interests in the interaction between the economy and the educational system. His recent work has included a comparative study among various Latin American educational systems.

Amado M. Padilla, Professor, earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of New Mexico in 1969. He studies early bilingualism and the acquisition of a second language in school-based foreign language programs. He is also involved in the California Foreign Language Project, a professional development program for foreign language teachers.

Guadalupe Valdes, Professor, received her Ph.D. in Spanish from Florida State University in 1972. She holds professorships at Stanford in both Education and Spanish & Portuguese. She is also director of the Spencer Project on Language Resources. Her research examines issues of elective and circumstantial bilingualism. She is among the most prominent experts on Spanish-English bilingualism in the United States.

School of Engineering

Bruce B. Lusignan, Associate Professor Emeritus, received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1963. He is an electrical engineer who designs and introduces advanced communication and space systems. Additionally, he directs an international planning commission for Mars exploration. His weekly Ethics of Development in a Global Environment (EDGE) seminar addresses issues of war and peace, trade, environment, poverty, and prejudice.

Leonard Ortolano, Professor, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. He specializes in water resources and environmental planning, with a current study on the efficacy of programs to subsidize treatment of wastewater along the Unites States-Mexico border. He has also worked as an environmental engineer for the U.S. Public Health Service. He is director of Stanford's Haas Center for Public Service.

Department of English

Ramon Saldivar, Professor, obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1977. His research interests include Chicano cultural studies and American, British, and postcolonial cultural history and theory.

Department of History

Zephyr Frank, Associate Professor, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign in 1999. He specializes in Latin American history, with an emphasis on the history of Brazil. He teaches courses on Latin America focusing on the family, economy, and culture and politics. His other interests include social structure, wealthholding, and slavery.

Stephen H. Haber, Professor of Latin American History. B.A., George Washington University; Ph.D., University of California at Los Angeles. Field of specializtion: comparative economic history.

Tamar Herzog, Professor, earned her Ph.D. from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. Herzog is the author of Upholding Justice: State, Law and the Penal System in Quito, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2004, and Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, Yale University Press, 2003.

Herbert S. Klein, Professor of Latin American History and Director of Latin American Studies. B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago.

Hoover Institution

William Ratliff, Research Fellow and Curator, obtained his Ph.D. in Latin American/Chinese History from the University of Washington. A former journalist, he is responsible for the Americas Collection at the Hoover Institution. He has interviewed dozens of international heads of state, including Fidel Castro, Carlos Menem, and Alberto Fujimori. He has also monitored elections in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Chile, and conducted private lecture tours in Latin America and around the world.

Program in Human Biology

Anne Firth Murray, Consulting Professor, earned her M.P.A. from New York University in 1977. She has conducted research in Mexico and Asia. Her area of specialization is women's health and human rights.

Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures

Héctor Hoyos, Assistant Professor, completed his Ph.D. in Romance Studies at Cornell University in 2008 and joined the Stanford faculty that same year. He specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature; visual culture; critical theory; and comparative and philosophical approaches to literature.

Marília Librandi Rocha, Assistant Professor, holds a Ph.D. in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade de São Paulo and focuses on Brazilian literature, particularly of the modern period.

Michael P. Predmore, Professor, received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1965. He is an expert in twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American literature. He frequently teaches classes at Stanford's overseas campus in Santiago, Chile.

Joan Ramon Resina, Professor, and Director of the Institute for Iberian Studies has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University. He specializes in Spanish and Catalan literatures with emphasis in the modern period. His interests are amply comparative, with a strong cultural component, ranging from urban studies to the collective memory and issues of political and social scale, such as the relation between the local and the global. More generally, his interests include modern and contemporary European narrative, Literary Theory, History of Ideas, Film Studies, Iberian Cultural and Political History. Currently, he is concerned with the cultural foundations of violence and war, and with the thorny issue of reparations. He has received two Ph.D.'s from two universities: UC Berkeley (Comparative Literature) and the University of Barcelona (English Philology).

Jorge Ruffinelli, Professor, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Uruguay in 1973. He is one of the foremost experts on Latin American cinema in the United States. He teaches courses on Latin American literature and film and is currently involved in the compilation of a comprehensive encyclopedia of Latin American film. Professor Ruffinelli has been instrumental in inviting acclaimed Latin American filmmakers to Stanford to teach classes under the Center for Latin American Studies Tinker Visiting Professor Program.

Lisa Surwillo, Assistant Professor, received her Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 2002 in Romance Languages and Literatures. She teaches courses on Iberian literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century Spanish theater. Her research encompasses the questions of property, modernity and the individual as they are manifested by literary works, especially dramatic literature, dealing with colonial slavery, abolition and Spanish citizenship. She has just received a fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Institute in support of her study of the role played by Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in abolition movements throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Professor Surwillo has recently completed a book that examines the development of copyright and authorship in nineteenth-century Spain and analyzes the impact of intellectual property on theater.

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Professor, obtained her Ph.D. in Spanish from Harvard University in 1974. She is an expert in Chicana/o studies with a particular focus on gender and queer theory. She teaches courses in Chicana/o visual art and cultural studies, women writers in the Spanish-speaking world, and sex and race in cultural representations.

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Rosamond Naylor, Senior Fellow, obtained her Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Stanford. Naylor is associate professor of economics by courtesy and the director of the Center for Environmental Sciences and Policy's Goldman honors program. Her research interests include agriculture and aquaculture, food security, and ecosystem services. She has also conducted work on women and rural development.

David G. Victor, Senior Fellow, obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science (international relations) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is associate professor of political science by courtesy and the director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Policy. His research interests include energy policy, electric power market reform, and rural energy development; genetically modified foods/plants and related trade policy; climate change policy; the role of technology, innovation and competition in development; and forest policy.

School of Law

Jonathan Greenberg, Lecturer in Law, specializes in negotiation, international conflict, war, and policy dilemmas.

Thomas C. Heller, Professor, received an AB from Princeton University in 1965 and an LLB (law degree) from Yale University in 1968. Heller is coordinator of the Rule of Law Program at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, a senior fellow at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Policy, and the Chair and Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies at Stanford. His work focuses on international law and political economy, law and development, energy law and policy, and environmental law.

Department of Linguistics

John R. Rickford, Professor, received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. He is an expert in the field of sociolinguistics, particularly in the relation between language and ethnicity. He has studied numerous pidgin and creole languages, with an emphasis on Gullah, Guyanese, and other Caribbean creoles. Additionally, he has done extensive research into the Ebonics issue.

School of Medicine

Victor Froelicher Jr., Professor, received his M.D. from University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center in 1967. He is a professor of cardiology whose research interests include clinical exercise physiology and exercise testing.

Evaleen K. Jones, Clinical Associate Professor, obtained her M.D. at Stanford University School of Medicine in 1991 and is certified for Family Practice. She specializes in international alternative medicine and has spent time working on projects in Ecuador.

Samuel LeBaron, Professor, has a Ph.D. from Michigan State University, obtained in 1979, and received his M.D. at the University of Calgary Medical School in 1989. He is certified for Family Practice and has worked on various research projects in Mexico.

Grant Miller, Assistant Professor of Medicine, received a B.A. in psychology from Yale College, a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in health policy/economics also from Harvard. His primary interests are in health and development economics, and economic demography. Miller's previous research has investigated the impact of water quality on health and the role of family planning in promoting development in Colombia.

Julie Parsonnet, Professor of Medicine, (Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine) and of Health Research and Policy at Stanford, received her M.D. from Cornell University Medical College in 1983. She specializes in the study of gastrointestinal diseases, particularly those caused by Heliobactor pylori infection, and she has conducted research in Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

Paul Wise, Professor, received a B.A. in Latin American studies from Cornell University, an M.D. from Cornell University and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health. Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society at Stanford. Wise has worked to improve healthcare practices and policies in developing countries. He is involved in child health projects in India, South Africa and Latin America, targeting diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS. He also travels each year to an indigenous village in Guatemala, where he teaches and provides care at the village clinic.

Department of Political Science

Terry L. Karl, Professor, received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1982. She is the former director of the Center for Latin American Studies and has conducted research all over Latin America. She holds the Gildred Chair in Latin American Studies at Stanford University. Her areas of expertise include comparative democratization in developing countries, democracy and inequality, resolution of civil wars, and the global politics of human rights. Recently, she provided expert testimony in war crimes trials against Salvadoran generals.

Beatriz Magaloni, Associate Professor, obtained her Ph.D. from Duke University in 1997. She specializes in the study of comparative politics and the political economy, and has done field research in Mexico.

Robert Packenham, Professor Emeritus, received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1964. He researches market-oriented reforms, politics and development in Latin America, with particular emphasis on Brazil. He has also conducted research on Mexico, Argentina, and Chile.

Gary Segura, Professor of Political Science and Chair of Chicana/o Studies

Michael A. Tomz, Associate Professor, obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2001. His research addresses questions of international political economy, with an emphasis on Latin America. He is currently conducting a project investigating the relationship between public opinion and Argentina's debt crisis.

Department of Religious Studies

Thomas Sheehan, Professor, has a Ph.D. from Fordham University. He specializes in contemporary European philosophy, emphasizing the study of Heidegger, Roman Catholicism, and liberation movements in Central America.

Department of Sociology

Alex Inkeles, Professor Emeritus, received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1949. His research interests include the social structure of the emerging worldwide society and cross-national comparative studies.

Tomás Jiménez, Assistant Professor

Michael J. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2000. He specializes in the study of race, ethnicity, immigration, and family structure, and has conducted research on alternative family forms, including interracial marriage.

Stanford Language Center

Jose Carlos Fajardo, Lecturer, teaches Quechua classes through the Stanford Language Center’s Special Language Program. He is a native of Peru.

Caridad Kenna, Lecturer, received her Ph.D. from Stanford’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 1997. She currently teaches several Spanish language and literature courses. She also teaches classes on Cuban literature and culture.

Alice Miano, Lecturer, is currently pursuing her Ph.D. from University of California-Berkeley. She teaches Spanish language classes.

Otilia Perales, Lecturer, obtained her M.A. in Latin American Studies from Stanford in 1994, followed by an M.A. in International Policy Studies in 1998.

Ana Sierra, Lecturer, received her Ph.D. from Stanford’s School of Education in 1993 in the Language, Literacy, and Culture area. She teaches several Spanish language courses, including a class for pre-med students.

Lyris Wiedemann, Senior Lecturer, earned her Ph.D. in Education at Stanford University in 1982. She is interested in language and culture, sociolinguistic variation, and language acquisition. She teaches courses on the Portuguese language, including a course aimed at speakers of Spanish.

Stanford University Libraries

Adan Griego is the curator for the Latin American, Mexican American, and Iberian Collections. He obtained both of his M.A. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been a curator at Stanford's Green Library since 1997.

Sergio Stone is the Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Librarian at the Robert Crown Law Library.

Robert Trujillo is the curator of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries. He earned an M.A. from California State University-Fullerton in 1974 and has been at Stanford since 1982.