Faculty & Staff > CLAS Visiting Scholars
Recent CLAS Visiting Scholars
2008-09
Nicole von Germeten holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Oregon State University. She has published two books: Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afromexicans, and an annotated translation of Alonso de Sandoval’s 1627 De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute, the earliest known book-length study of African slavery in the Americas.
Teresa Delfín completed her Ph.D. in 2007 in Stanford's Program in Modern Thought and Literature with a doctoral minor in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She received an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, Shining Paths: Tourism and the Marketing of Innocence in Cusco, Peru, which is an ethnographic account of state reinvention in the wake of the crises of the Shining Path and Fujimorismo, as seen through the lens of tourism.
Joan Casanovas obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. at SUNY at Stony Brook. He has published “Bread, or Bullets”: urban labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba 1850-1898 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998). A revised version of this book in Spanish was published by Siglo XXI de España Editores in 2000. He is an associate professor of Latin American history at the Universitat Rovira I Virgili, in Tarragona, Spain. While at Stanford during the summer of 2009, he will work on the last stage of his research on semi-free urban labor in Cuba in the mid-19th century.
Magdalena Chocano obtained a Ph. D. in History at SUNY at Stony Brook. She has published La fortaleza docta: elite letrada y dominación social en México (siglos XVI y XVII) (Barcelona, 2000) and La América española: Cultura y vida cotidiana, 1492-1763 (Madrid, 2000). She is currently lecturer at the Fundació Universitària Rovira i Virgili and researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. While at Stanford during the summer of 2009, she will be working on a project entitled "Liberalism in Peru, late 19th and early 20 centuries," which aims at examining Liberals' efforts of association and networking to achieve a change on issues they considered vital for Peru's modernization: civil marriage, voting rights, religious freedom, lay elite and popular education, women's citizenship and freedom of the press.
2007-08
Karina Galperín is an Assistant Professor at the Torcuato Di Tella University. She received her Ph.D. (2002) in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University, where she returned as a Visiting Scholar in the spring of 2006. She has been commended for her instruction of Spanish language and literature. Her current research examines female narrators in early modern Iberia. In 2003, she was a Visiting Professor at Stanford’s Spanish and Portuguese Department. As a Visiting Scholar in Latin American Studies, Dr. Galperín will investigate early modern Spain through painter and sculptor Alonso Berruguete and poet Alonso de Ercilla.
Jennie Popp was born in Chile into a multicultural family. She studied Literature and Linguistics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she received an M.A. in Hispanic Literature. Currently, she is working on her Ph.D. dissertation in Sociolinguistics (Universidad de Valladolid-Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile). She is a Spanish Lecturer at the Stanford University Center in Santiago, Chile. She also teaches at Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello, and has been a lecturer at Pontificia Universidad Católica and Universidad del Pacífico. She was also a Programme Coordinator and Spanish Lecturer at University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Julia Sarreal is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University. She is currently writing her dissertation on the decline of the Guarani missions of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil during the late eighteenth century. Her research links the dissolution of the missions and Guarani empowerment with larger issues such as Bourbon reforms, trade liberalization, regional growth, and imperial conflict between the Spanish and the Portuguese Crowns.
Iraida Casique earned her B.A. in Letras from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (1984). She also has a Masters in Literatura Latinoamericana Contemporánea from the Universidad Simón Bolívar (1994), and a Ph.D in Spanish American Literature from Rutgers. At present, Iraida is an Associate Professor at the Departamento de Lengua y Literatura at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on Latin American Literature. She is researching the the role of intellectuals in different Latin American Socialist Revolutions of the 20th Century, including the current “Revolución Bolivariana” in Venezuela.
Cecilia Taiana was trained in Buenos Aires, Paris, London and Ottawa. A region of central interest to Dr. Taiana is Latin America, and in particular, Argentina, a country marked by political trauma and dictatorships. In 1995, Dr. Taiana co-edited The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, an interdisciplinary book by sociologists, historians and cultural theorists that explores the vicissitudes of north–south cultural identities. In the area of trauma and memory, she is the author of Confession and its Twin, Torture: Re-thinking the Therapeutic Alliance, an article published in a refereed book published in 1995. More recently, she published an article in the History of Psychology (November 2005), entitled "Conceptual Resistance in the Disciplines of the Mind: The Buenos Aires-Leipzig Connection at the Turn of the Twentieth Century."
Based on her research on the transatlantic migration of psychoanalytical discourse, she contributed a chapter, Internationalizing the History of Psychology (Adrian Brock, Ed. 2006), entitled "Transatlantic Migration of the Disciplines of the Mind: An Examination of the Reception of Wundt's and Freud's Theories in Argentina" and an article "The Emergence of Freud's Theories in Argentina: Towards A Comparison with the US" to the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis (November 2006). Last winter, Cecilia wrote a biographical note on Jacques Lacan for the editors of the Dictionary of Medical Biography published by Greenwood Publishers in 2006. She will continue her work on Jacques Lacan during her next sabbatical (2007-2008), when she plans to document the role of Lacanian study groups in Argentina during the period of the last dictatorship (1976-83).
Liliana Obregon is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the International Law Program at the University of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Professor Obregon obtained her doctoral degree from Harvard University, where she specialized in the history and theory of international law and international institutions, with particular interest in the study of Latin American regionalist perspectives. She also holds an MA in International Affairs from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, where she concentrated in Latin American Studies. Representative publications include "Between Civilization and Barbarism: Creole Interventions in International Law," in International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice," edited by Richard Falk, Balakrishnan Rajagopal and Jacqueline Stevens, Routledge-Cavendish, London (2008). "Noted for Dissent: The International Life of Alejandro Alvarez", special edition of the Leiden Journal of International Law, volume 19, no. 4, Cambridge University Press (2006). "Creole Consciousness and International Law in Nineteenth Century Latin America" in International Law and Its Others, edited by Anne Orford, Cambridge University Press (2006), and "In Search of Hope: The Plight of Displaced Colombians" in The Forsaken People, edited by Roberta Cohen and Francis Deng, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. (1998).
Francisco A. Ortega is the Director of the Center for Social Studies (CES) at National University of Colombia in Bogota. He is also an associate professor at the History Department and teaches in the Cultural Studies graduate program. Mr. Ortega obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2000), where he specialized in Colonial Latin American studies and critical cultural theory. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 1995 to 1999 and was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 2000 to 2004. He spent 2003 in Colombia as a Fulbright scholar. Mr. Ortega has edited a Spanish language anthrology on Michel de Certeau (La irrupcion de lo impensado, Bogota, 2003) and a newly published collection of essays by US-based anthropologist Veena Das and local Colombian authors focusing on social violence, language and interpretation (Veena Das: Sujetos de dolor, agentes de dignidad, Bogota, 2008). He has also published in academic journals in the US, Mexico, Peru and Colombia on colonial Latin American intellectual history.
2006-2007
Felicia Fahey (United States) is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature at Bates College. Her publications have focused on travel, diaspora, nationality, and representations of identity in twentieth century Latin American narratives. Professor Fahey is the author of The Will to Heal: Psychological Recovery in the Novels of Latina Writers, forthcoming this Fall. Her book examines representations of trauma and recovery in the autobiographical fictions of Latin American and U.S. Latina women authors.
Enrique Hernandez Laos (Mexico) is Professor of Economics at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. He is currently a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores in Mexico. He is the author of more than 25 books and 60 specialized papers published on economic and social issues in Mexico and Latin America. His current research focuses on productivity growth performance of the Mexican economy and its effects on economic growth. Dr. Laos earned a degree in Economics from the Monterrey Institute of Technology, an MA in Economics at El Colegio de Mexico and a Ph.D. in Economics from the School of Social Studies at the University of East Anglia.
Oliver Kozlarek (Mexico) is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico. He was born in 1965 in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. He received a doctorate in social sciences from Freie Universität Berlin (1997) and a doctorate in humanities from the Metropolitan Autonomous University Iztapalapa (2001). In Mexico, he has worked in the Department of Sociology of the UAM-Azcapotzalco, and the Department of Philosophy of the UAM-Iztapalapa. His research areas include: social philosophy and politics as well as of social theory. Specialization topics are: internationalization of the political and social thought, theories of the globalization, critical theory, theories of the modernity and sociological theory.
Dora Isabel Paiva da Costa (Brazil) is a professor in the Department of Economics of the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Sao Paulo, Brazil. She received her M.A. from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP in Campinas and her Ph.D. from Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janiero. She has written many articles looking at the history of Brazil in the 1700 and 1800s. Her main interests are frontier history, family history, population and demographic history, and also social and economic history.
Carlos Reborati (Argentina) is a geographer (U. of Buenos Aires, 1973). His main fields of interest are rural geography and environmental conflicts. His most recent books are La Quebrada (La Colmena, Buenos Aires, 2003) and Ambiente y Sociedad (Ariel, Buenos Aires, 2002). He has been a visiting professor at Wisconsin-Madison (2004), Cantabrica (Spain, 2002), Berkeley (1999) and Tubingen (Germany, 1996).
Maria Aparecida de Souza Lopes (Brazil) is professor of history of the Americas at Universidade Estadual Paulista. She graduated (BA) from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, (SP, Brazil, 1993), and obtained her PhD from El Colegio de México (Mexico City, 1999). The results of her PhD dissertation have been published by El Colegio de México and El Colegio de Michoacán in 2005 under the title De costumbres y leyes: Abigeato y derechos de propiedad en Chihuahua durante el porfiriato. In 2001 she spent one semester at the University of California in San Diego as a Research Fellow in the Center for US-Mexican Studies, where she started her present research that deals with livestock trade relations between the United States and Mexico in the nineteenth century. Apart from researching in Northern Mexico – most of her findings have been published in several journals in Brazil and Mexico – she has also done work comparing the Brazilian and the Mexican independence movements; on the creation and evolution of urban centers in South America, during the Colonial period, and on the Brazilian land laws in the nineteenth century. Her most recent paper is entitled “Del taller a la fábrica: vida cotidiana de los trabajadores chihuahuenses en la primera mitad del siglo xx”. This piece is the product of a seminar organized by professors Pilar Gonzalbo (El Colegio de Mexico) and Aurelio de los Reyes (UNAM), between 2000 and 2001, which result in the publication of Historia de la vida cotidiana en México,in five volumes, by El Colegio de México & Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Harold Trinkunas (United States) is an Associate Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His research and writing focuses on Latin American politics, particularly democratization and civil-military relations. He recently authored Crafting Civilian Control of the Military in Venezuela (University of North Carolina, 2005). He received a B.S. in Economics and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 1999 after conducting extensive field research in Argentina and Venezuela. He also served as the field officer for the Carter Center electoral observation mission in Venezuela during the highly contested 1998 congressional and presidential elections.
2005-2006
Jimena Arenas (United States) is a doctoral candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University. Arenas obtained her undergraduate degree in Spain from Complutense University and earned two master's degrees in Colombia from the Universidad de los Andes, one in journalism and the other in public administration. She studied under a Fulbright scholarship at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government where she obtained a master's degree in public policy. She has a background in television journalism. She has also worked for the Colombian Ministry of Environment. While at Stanford, Arenas conducted doctoral research on inequalities in North-South environmental negotiations.
Luisa Farah Schwartzman (United States) is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is currently writing her dissertation on the relationship between race and class in Brazil. Before starting her Ph.D., Luisa received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and completed a master’s degree in Latin American studies at Stanford.
Peter Steeves (United States) earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University in 1995. He is associate professor of philosophy at DePaul University where he specializes in ethics, social/political philosophy, and phenomenology. In fall 2005, Steeves worked on the final chapter of his book "The Things Themselves," a chapter that deals with his time living in Venezuela and attempts to pull together magic realism, democratic theory, and the Venezuela experience. He also did research for his upcoming book on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez that argues for a nonliberal understanding of democracy and investigating the communitarian foundations of Chávez's Bolivarian revolution.
2004-2005
Marcelo Alegre (Argentina) is a professor of law and philosophy at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Palermo. He holds an L.L.M. from NYU Law School where he recently completed his doctoral dissertation on egalitarianism at the moral, economic, and political levels. His research interests lie in political and legal philosophy. While at Stanford, he studied the possibility, content, and challenges of an egalitarian institutional agenda for Argentina.
Marián Beltrán (Spain) received her B.A. in American Anthropology in 1987 from the Universidad Complutense, Madrid, and her M.A. in Latin American Studies in 1995 from Stanford. Since 2001, she has been an adjunct professor in anthropology at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain where she is currently a Ph.D. student in anthropology. For the past two years, Marián has conducted fieldwork in Nicaragua. At Stanford she conducted doctoral research on the tensions between the ethnic minorities of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and the central government.
Emily Booth (United States) is a dual M.A/J.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. At Stanford, Emily conducted research on the relationship between economic growth, democracy, inequality and human rights in Guatemala, focusing on micro-finance programs and their efforts to alleviate poverty and empower women.
Karen Coppock (United States) researches corporate strategy and economic development. At Stanford, Karen completed her doctoral research on improving multi-stakeholder partnerships designed to increase Internet demand in emerging markets (Mexico). Karen has a diverse international background including high-tech marketing, grassroots economic development and market research. Karen expects to receive her doctoral degree from Tufts University in the Spring of 2005.
Roshni Rustomji Kerns (United States) is a professor emerita from Sonoma State University, where she taught courses in women's studies, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary studies and coordinated the India Studies Program. A previous visiting scholar at CLAS, she coordinated the Asians in Latin America Working Group and also supervised the publication Américas y Latinas.
Patricia Seed (United States) is a professor of history at Rice University. She pioneered the comparative approach to the history of European empires in the Americas. Her books include ''To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico'' (1992), and the ground-breaking comparative studies, ''Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World'' (1995) and ''American Pentimento'' (2001), in which she contrasts English and Spanish approaches to the management of indigenous peoples.
2003-2004
Marcelo Alegre (Argentina) is a professor of law and philosophy at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Palermo. He holds an L.L.M. from NYU Law School where he is finishing his doctoral dissertation on egalitarianism at the moral, economic, and political levels. His research interests lie in political and legal philosophy. While at Stanford, he will be studying the possibility, content, and challenges of an egalitarian institutional agenda for Argentina.
Chris Duffield (United States) has done field work in Mexico and specializes in the development of electronic, mechanical, and biomedical devices. His current project at Stanford involves the historical research and scientific validation of insulin potentiation therapy (IPT), a medical breakthrough first demonstrated by Mexican physician Donato Pérez García in 1930.
Mark Eisner (United States) is an alumnus of the CLAS M.A. program who has been working on the Pablo Neruda Centennial Project, a series of English translations of Neruda's work.
Roshni Rustomji Kerns (United States) is a professor emerita from Sonoma State University, where she taught courses in women's studies, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary studies and coordinated the India Studies Program.
2002-2003
Daniel Cáceres (Argentina) holds a Ph.D. from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. During his time at Stanford, he researched agricultural practices in northwest Córdoba, Argentina. One of his recent research projects addressed the differences between commercial and organic farming in the region.
Chris Duffield (United States) has done field work in Mexico and specializes in the development of electronic, mechanical, and biomedical devices. He is currently at Stanford researching insulin potentiation therapy as a cancer treatment.
Mark Eisner (United States) is an alumnus of the CLAS M.A. program who has been working on the Pablo Neruda Centennial Project, a series of English translations of Neruda's work.
Antonio Eligio "Tonel" Fernández (Cuba) is Stanford's artist-in-residence. A Cuban-born artist and art historian now residing in San Francisco, his prolific career has included numerous exhibitions, publications, awards and fellowships, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. In 1982 he received a degree in art history from the Universidad de La Habana, Cuba, and since then he has shown his work consistently in personal and group exhibitions in the Caribbean, North America, South America and Europe. His most recent solo exhibition is Tonel: Lessons of Solitude (2000-01) which has been displayed in Cuba, New York, and Vancouver. He has worked as an artist-in-residence at universities in Germany, New York, and most recently in the United Kingdom, and has also received fellowships to work and research in Cuba. Tonel has received more than a dozen awards and prizes for his visual art, most recently the Distinción por la Cultura National from the Cuban Ministry of Culture (1994).
Marusa Freire (Brazil) is the former attorney General of Brazil's antitrust agency, the Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica-CADE, in the Ministry of Justice. She holds a law degree from the Universidade de Brasília. While at Stanford, Freire researched law and political economy, and the constitutional restraints to the use of monetary power by the federal government. She has also worked as an attorney at the Brazilian Central Bank. She is now studying in Portugal.
Joan Kruckewitt (United States) is an alumnus of CLAS and a journalist who lived in Nicaragua from 1983-1991 and covered the war between the Sandinistas and the U.S.-backed Contras for ABC Radio. She graduated from the CLAS M.A. program in 1995 and reported from Latin America and Europe for various radio networks and newspapers. She also authored the book The Death Of Ben Linder:The Story of a North American in Sandinista Nicaragua. She is currently writing a book on U.S.-trained death squad in Honduras in the 1980s.
2001-2002
Mauro Barbosa de Almeida (Brazil) is a professor of anthropology at the State University of Campinas at São Paulo, Brazil who specializes in political ecology, local participation in resource management, and social theory, focusing on northeast Brazil and the Amazon. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and, before that, his B.A. and M.A. at the University of São Paulo.
Gabriela Cano (Mexico) is a professor of history at UNAM in Mexico City, and also directs the cultural history magazine Signos Históricas. Her work centers on the social and political history of modern Mexico with a focus on gender. While at CLAS, Professor Cano researched the cultural history of gender in modern Latin America through the study of biography.
Juan Gastó Coderch (Chile) came to CLAS as a visiting fellow in Environmental Policy. He is a professor of Agronomics and Forest Engineering at the Catholic University of Chile, and holds degrees in agronomic engineering from the University of Chile and Colorado State University. His research interests include rural space planning, ecology, sustainable development, and natural resources, topics on which he has published a number of books and articles as well.
Marcelo Gumucio (Bolivia/United States) is a native of Bolivia who came to the United States to study, where he earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of San Francisco and an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Idaho, as well as a degree from Harvard's Advanced Management Program. He has served as a CEO of several publicly-held companies and, upon retirement, came to CLAS to study Quechua.
Guillermo Jorge (Argentina) is an attorney specializing in international human rights, criminal law, and corruption. He has worked for the law firm Moreno Ocampo Abogados y Consultores and taught at the University of Buenos Aires School of Law. He received his degree in law from the University of Buenos Aires in 1995 and has practiced and taught law since.
Mario Rolf Treuherz (Brazil) spent his time at CLAS conducting research on investment in the Brazilian stock market, and completed a book entitled The Crisis Manual for Emerging Countries. He is a professor at the University of São Paulo School of Economics and Business Administration and has written numerous articles and books on topics related to globalization, financial analysis, public debt and management. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of São Paulo and has also worked as a consultant for a number of public and private firms.
2000-2001
Bouchra Bounoua (Mexico) spent her time at CLAS researching the impact of the Internet on the Mexican economy. She worked on developing a framework for elaborating and implementing a global strategy plan for Latin American firms, leveraging the internet as a new trade channel. Before coming to Stanford she worked as a financial analyst in the Silicon Valley and in Mexico City, and as an environmental engineer in Mexico City.
Kathleen Dill (United States) is a graduate of the Ph.D. program in anthropology at UC-Davis who spent a quarter at the Center while working on her dissertation. She conducted two years of field research in Guatemala on political violence, international displacement, human rights organization, conflict resolution and reconciliation, and ethnic/class/gender relations. Her dissertation is entitled Silent Negotiations: Women, Human Rights, and Citizenship in Post-War Guatemala.
Elena Granell de Aldaz (Venezuela) is originally from Spain and lives in Venezuela. She is a professor at the Institute for Higher Studies in Administration in Caracas and holds in a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Central University of Venezuela. Her research focuses on human resources, global trends in international competition, and cross-cultural management.
Claudio Milman (Argentina) is a professor of international business at the Graduate School of Business at Rollins College. Dr. Milman's research interests included cross cultural training, mergers and acquisitions, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and determinants of foreign direct investment. He also taught at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, South Korea and Universidad del CEMA (Centro de Estudios Macroeconomicos de la Argentina) in Buenos Aires. He has done consulting work for Shell Oil and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Marietta Ortega Perrier (Chile) came to Stanford to continue her research project on gender and entrepreneurship among Aymara migrants in Arica, Chile. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and is a professor at the University of Tarapacá in Chile. Professor Ortega has published several manuscripts on culture and ethnicity in the Andres.
Heloisa Pontes (Brazil) is a professor of anthropology at the University of Campinas in Brazil. She has written two books on cinema and writers in Brazil as well as numerous articles on topics related to literature, art, and anthropology. While at Stanford, she worked on research about modern twentieth-century theater in Brazil. She earned her M.A. in Social Anthropology at the University of Campinas and her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of São Paulo.
Héctor Rueda de León (Japan) is a professor in the School of International Economics, Politics, Business and International Communications at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan. He is a specialist on the economics, political and social relations between Japan and Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present and teaches courses in Spanish and Latin American literature and culture.
Kimberly Theidon (United States), a former doctoral fellow at CLAS, earned her Ph.D. in medical anthropology from UC-Berkeley where she wrote a dissertation entitled "Traumatic States: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru." She received an M.A. in Anthropology and an M.A. in Behavior Sciences from UC-Berkeley. Currently she teaches at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research interests include Latin American Studies, critical theory applied to medicine, psychology and anthropology, gender and sexuality, domestic, structural and political violence, human rights, conflict resolution and reconciliation, the anthropology of development, and drug policy.
1999-2000
Wille Bolle (Germany/Brazil) is originally from Germany and now works as a professor of comparative literature at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. During his year at Bolivar House, Dr. Bolle conducted research on a project entitled, The portrait of Brazil in João Guimarães Rosa's novel Grande Sertão: Veredas.
James Gordon Brotherston (Great Britain/United States) is originally from England, and held dual appointments as professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington and research professor of Literature at the University of Essex. During his time at Stanford, he worked on a project studying indigenous accounts of tropical American culture. He has published many books, articles, and essays on topics including indigenous literature in the Americas and Latin American intellectualism. He has also edited and translated a number of Latin American literary pieces including stories by Jorge Borges and indigenous poetry. Dr. Brotherston has since become a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford, and is currently chair of his department.
Ponciano del Pino (Peru) received his undergraduate and graduate education in history at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho-Peru. While at Stanford, del Pino conducted research on contemporary Peruvian history. He has published numerous articles, many of which focus on the recent civil war in Peru and the related issues of citizenship, democratization, historical memory, and cultural identity. He has also worked on research projects with various international organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, World Vision and Doctors Without Borders.
Jane Jaquette (United States) is a professor of political science at Occidental College, and the current chair of Diplomacy and World Affairs there. She teaches courses on international relations, Latin American politics, and women, politics and power. She earned a Ph.D. in Government at Cornell University and has also served at Occidental as the chair of Women's Studies and Latin American Studies and as President of the Latin American Studies Association from 1995-1997. Professor Jaquette has published several books and many articles pertaining to women's movements and political development in Latin America. While on sabbatical at CLAS, she conducted research on 'women and democratization: participation and citizenship at the end of the twentieth century.'
Jocelyn Olcott (United States) was a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University who worked on her dissertation during her year at Stanford. She wrote on women's organizing during the consolidation of the postrevolutionary regime in Mexico, particularly the regions of Comarca Langunera, Michoacan and Yucatán. She has taught a course on Sex and Gender in Latin America and has published a number of papers on women's movements and gender in Mexico.
Charles Pearson (United States) was a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin who spent his time at Stanford working on a book about drug and border issues relating to the colonias in El Paso and the maquiladoras in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. He also worked with fellow Visiting Scholar Victoria Sanford as a guest speaker in her summer course on race and gender. Pearson earned his B.A. and M.A. in anthropology at UT-Austin as well and has presented and published numerous papers on border issues.
David Post (United States) is a professor of education at Penn State University and holds degrees in education from the University of Chicago and Columbia University. His research interests include the sociology of educational expansion in Latin America as well as educational policy in the United States, Latin America, and East Asia. During his time at Stanford he worked on his book, Family Welfare and Children's Schooling in Latin America.
Paula Zuñiga (Chile) holds a degree in urban development from the Institute for Urban Studies and a degree in social work from the School of Social Work. She has served as executive director and project manager for a Chilean NGO called Instituto de Desarrollo y Cooperación (Institute for Development and Cooperation). She has also taught courses in sociology and social work at the Universidad Católica Blas Cañas and at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. During her stay at Stanford, she researched social and environmental politics in Chile.
1998-1999
Oscar Arturo Benavides Gonzalez (Colombia) came to Stanford as a doctoral candidate in economics from the National University of Colombia. During his stay he worked on a research project on education, growth, and development. He also studied human resources in the structural adjustment process in Colombia and the role of development in the "Peaceful Revolution." Benavides received his education in economics at the National University at Bogotá and from 1994-1996 taught at the Universidad Externado de Colombia. He has also published several articles on political economy, in conjunction with the Inter-American Development Bank and other government and non-governmental organizations.
Clemente Forero (Colombia) is a professor of economics at the National University of Colombia. He conducted research at Stanford on decentralization in Colombia. He gave a presentation at CLAS entitled, "Why Colombia Decentralized its Government." Professor Forero earned his B.A. in Math and Physics in France, an M.S. in Engineering and an M.A. in Economics at Stanford, and a Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford. He has directed the Colombian government's science and technology agency and has also taught at the Universidad de Valle and the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
Juan Manuel Delgado-Moreira (Spain) was educated in Spain, earning his B.A. and Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. While at Stanford, he conducted research on paradigms of citizenship, comparing multiculturalism and transnationalism in the European Union with the experience of cultural citizenship in the U.S. Latino community.
Soledad Gonzalez Montes (Mexico) is a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Program of Women's Studies at El Colegio de Mexico and holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She has published on numerous topics related to gender relations and change in Mexican rural families since the beginning of the twentieth century and also works on peasant communities' oral history, culture and creativity. While at Stanford, she researched the health consequences of violence against women in an indigenous region of Mexico.
Jeffrey Harr (United States) is director of the Inter-American Business and Labor Program at the North-South Center, University of Miami. He came to CLAS to conduct research for his study on the impact of NAFTA on labor-management relations in multi-national and local manufacturing companies in Canada and Mexico. He holds degrees from Colombia University, Johns Hopkins University and the School of International Service at American University, and has written a number of books and articles on privatization, banking reform, development, and trade relationships in the Americas.
Bernando Navarrete Yáñez (Chile) was adoctoral candidate in government and public administration at the University Institute Ortega y Gasset at the Universidad Complutense of Madird, Spain, when he spent a year at Stanford conducting research for his doctoral thesis on local politics in Chile. He also researchied public administration and political reform. Navarrete received an M.A. in Political Science from the Catholic University of Chile, and an M.A. in Social Sciences from the Catholic University of Lovaina in Belgium. He has published several journal articles on politics in Chile.
Rogelio Pérez Perdomo (Venezuela) is a professor of law at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración in Venezuela. He earned his law degree from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and also holds an M.A. in Law from Harvard University. He was a visiting professor at the Law School and taught a course entitled Law in Latin America in the fall semester.
José Ruiz San Román (Spain) is a professor of sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research interests include public opinion and mass communications. He spent several months at Stanford working on a research project entitled Social Consequences of the Implementation of Digital TV.
Roshni Rustomji Kerns (United States) is a professor emerita from Sonoma State University, where she taught courses in women's studies, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary studies and coordinated the India Studies Program. She edits an anthropology journal entitled The Geography of Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas. During her time at CLAS she directed the working group on Asians in Latin America, and also coordinated the Directed Research/Reading course on Asians in Latin America. She also advised the publication Américas y Latinas.
Judit Sándor is a professor of political science and human rights at Central European University in Budapest, where she earned her Ph.D. in Political Science and a law degree. Her primary research interests are community health and reproductive rights. While at Stanford she collaborated with both the Institute for International Studies Working Group on Democratization and Human Rights and the CLAS Working Group on Community Health.
Thomas Michael Scruggs (United States) teaches music at the University of Iowa, where he formerly directed the Latin American Studies program. His research interests include the use of music, dance, and other forms of expressive culture to negotiate social and ethnic identity, particularly among the indigenous people of eastern Nicaragua as well as other parts of Central America and the Caribbean. Professor Scruggs earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas-Austin.
Harold Trinkunas (United States) earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. His primary research interest is civilian control of the armed forces in emerging democracies. He served as coordinator of the Seminar on Comparative Democratization, which is sponsored by Stanford's Institute for International Studies. He is currently an assistant professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California
Alvaro Zerda-Sarmiento (Colombia) is a professor of economics at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Bogotá and a senior researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo. He came to Stanford while pursuing a Ph.D. in Economics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Bogotá. He also holds a degree in business management from the Escuela de Administración de Negocios, Bogotá. His research interests are the costs and prices of drugs in Colombia and property rights in the pharmaceutical sector.
1997-1998
Desirée Elizondo Cabrera (Nicaragua) is the former director of Nicaragua's Environmental Directorate. She received her undergraduate and graduate education in agriculture and soil and water science at UC-Davis. Before designing and developing Nicaragua's Environmental Protection Agency, Elizondo worked with the Norwegian Agency for International Development and directed the national soils program of Nicaragua's Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform. She has also published a number of papers related to sustainable development, environmental protection and conservation, agriculture, and ecology.
Carlos Chamorro (Nicaragua) came to Stanford on a Knight Fellowship in 1997-1998. While originally trained as an economist, Chamorro worked in that field for only a short time. After the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, he became Vice Minister of Culture and created a new daily newspaper, Barricada, which he directed until 1994. In 1995 he founded a non-governmental organization, CINCO, dedicated to researching the media and public opinion. He also directs a weekly television news show, Esta Semana, and founded the weekly investigative journalism and political analysis newsletter Confidencial. Chamorro now works as a media consultant in Central America.
Maria Izabel Noll (Brazil) is a professor of political science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sol, where she earned her undergraduate and masters degrees in history and political science. She also received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences in Paris, France. She has published widely on topics related to Latin American politics.
Suzana Sawyer earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research examines struggles over resources in the Ecuadorian Amazon, focusing specifically on conflicts over land and petroleum development among indigenous peoples, the state, and multinational oil companies. She wrote a dissertation entitled, The Cultural Politics of Nation, Territory, and Resource-Use in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon. Currently, she is a professor of anthropology at UC-Davis.
Tonci Tomac (Chile) spent a year at Stanford as a Visiting Fellow in Environmental Policy. He holds graduate degrees in agricultural engineering and economy from the Catholic University of Chile. He has worked as a consultant at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), has consulted at the Ministry of Agricutlure and has directed ECO-LOGICA, a private consulting group, and CEGADES, an environmental NGO. Professor Tomac's research interests include sustainable agriculture and rural development, technological innovation and institutional change.
1996-1997
Margaret Althuon (Brazil)
Dr. Mauricio A. Dávila Sánchez (Mexico) researched Mexico's energy and petrochemical industries, analyzing state programs to restructure and divest the assets of these industries as part of the country's privatization initiative. Dr. Dávila is from Mexico City and was educated in Mexico and Canada. He earned his M.S. in Chemical Energy and a Ph.D. in Political Economy in Quebec, Canada at Laval University.
Stephen Diamond (United States) is an attorney and political scientist. During his time at Stanford, his research focused on the role of new legal institutions in the management of the emerging global economy. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of London and his law degree at Yale. Diamond has published on topics including international trade, labor rights, and human rights in the global economy, particularly labor issues relating to NAFTA.
Carolina Diaz-Walls (Mexico) is a professor of psychology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. She received her undergraduate and graduate education in psychology and philosophy there and in the meantime has conducted research on child development in Paris, France and on family therapy in Mexico City. She has published on the history and theory of psychology and feminism. While at Stanford, Diaz-Wells researched intergenerational patterns of family violence in Mexico, focusing in particular on adolescent mothers from middle or lower class family backgrounds.
Diego Garcia Prieto (Chile) is an attorney who came to CLAS as the center's first visiting fellow in environmental policy. He works on a wide range of environmental policy issues at the Chilean Secretaría General de la Presidencia. While at Stanford, he worked to broaden discussion on Chilean efforts to preserve and protect natural resources, while moving forward with economic development and global competitiveness.
Maria Angeles Guzmán Molina (Mexico) was a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Florence who came to CLAS to do research for her dissertation, Peasant Organizations and their Role in Political Change in Mexico. Guzmán holds a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Political Analysis from the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Mexico.
Manuel Hidalgo (Spain) is a professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He spent time at Stanford conducting research on 'The Problem of Democracy in Latin America.' He holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Madrid and has published a number of articles on the topic of politics and democratization in Latin America.
Andre Odenbreit Carvalho (Brazil) is a diplomat with the Brazilian foreign service. He received his B.A. and M.A. in History at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro as well as a degree in diplomacy from the Instituto Rio Branco. During his time at Stanford he audited several graduate courses in international economics, history and political science.
Brasilio Sallum (Brazil) is a professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo, where he received his B.A. and doctorate degrees. Professor Sallum came to Stanford on a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research on the new Brazilian strategy towards economic development. He has published a number of articles on political transitions and institutions in Brazil.
Carlos Guilherme Mota (Brazil) is a professor of contemporary history at the Universidad de São Paulo, Brazil. He founded the Instituto de Estudios Avançadas and currently directs a research group there called História, Memória e Reinvencião de América Latina. His research examines the contemporary intellectual history of Brazil. While at Stanford, he worked on updating his best-selling book Ideologia da Cultura Brasiliera (1933-1974) and participated in the Latin American Studies M.A. seminar on culture and democracy in Latin America.
Helgio Trinidade (Brazil) researched the construction of democracy, economic adjustment processes, state reform, and regional integration in Latin America during his time at Stanford. He also participated actively in the CLAS working groups on comparative democratization and Brazil. Professor Trinidade holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Paris, Sorbonne and is a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil.
Sebastio Velasco e Cruz (Brazil) is a political scientist from Brazil, where he teaches at the Campinas State University (UNICAMP). He received his Ph.D. from the University of São Paulo and also studied at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris. His work has included transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, and his research at CLAS focused on economic restructuring and business strategies in Brazil. During his time here, he also participated actively in the CLAS Working Group on Comparative Democratization.
Georgina Waylen (United Kingdom) is a professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. She has published on issues related to gender and Third World politics, women's movements, and democratization in Latin America and feminism and the state in Chile. Her research at Stanford focused on gender and economic and political liberalization in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. She also coordinated the Center's Working Group on Women and Gender.
1995-1996
Tarcisio Costa (Brazil) received a law degree in Brazil, and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cambridge. During his time at Bolivar House he worked on research for his Ph.D. dissertation about contemporary liberal discourse in Brazil, particularly the 1987-1988 National Constituent Assembly. Before pursuing graduate studies in the United Kingdom, Costa served as a diplomat in Brasilia and London, and as Deputy Consul of Brazil in San Francisco.
Graciela Ducatenzeiler (Canada) is a professor of political science at the University of Montreal. She received her education in sociology and economics in Argentina and Paris. During her time at Stanford she researched the political and social problems related to consolidation of democracy in Latin America, and gave a lecture entitled Building Governability in Argentina.
Patricia Fernandez de Castro (Mexico) was a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago, when she spent the spring of 1996 at Bolivar House researching her Ph.D. dissertation on popular resistance movements in Durango, Mexico between 1910-1915. Before commencing her Ph.D. studies she earned an M.A. in Mexican History at the University of Texas-Austin, and a B.A. at the Center for International Studies in Mexico.
Veronique Gauthier Lecaros (France/Peru) is a native of France, who has traveled extensively, including two years each in Nicaragua and Peru. She holds M.A.s in Philosophy from the Sorbonne and Stanford, and a Ph.D. in Art History from the School of High Studies in Social Sciences in France. During her time at Stanford she conducted research on Pre-Columbian Peruvian history and religion.
Patrick Hunt (United States) is now a professor in Stanford's Classics Department, As a visiting scholar at CLAS, he conducted research for a course entitled, Archaeology, Environment and Geopolitics: Global Threats to International Cultural Resources. Professor Hunt received a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of London and has published a number of articles on Andean and Central American archaeology. He has taught courses at Stanford on Pre-Columbian art and archaeology and conducted field research in Central America, Peru, Italy, Greece, Israel, and Egypt.
Jose Montalvo (Puerto Rico) is a composer and a professor of music at the University of Puerto Rico. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from New York University. While at Stanford he taught a course through the Music Department on twentieth century composers in Latin America.
Vera Paiva (Brazil) is a professor of psychology at the University of São Paulo, where she earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees, and is also a practicing psychologist. Her research interests include gender norms, sexuality, and sexual culture and AIDS prevention, topics encompassed in her doctoral thesis and on which she has also written a number of other articles. During her stay at Stanford she gave several presentations about her research.
Rodolfo Stavenhagen (Mexico) is a professor and senior research scholar in political science at El Colégio de México. While at Stanford, he participated in a symposium, Mexico at a Turning Point: Social, Political and Economic Perspectives, in which he gave a presentation related to social disparities and the political transition. Currently, he works at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, where his research projects include ethnic conflicts and development, and racism and public policy.
Fernando Toledo (Chile) is a professor of international law at the Catholic University of Chile, and came to Stanford as a fellow at Stanford's Program in International Legal Studies. Professor Toledo has worked as a consultant to the National Environmental Commission in Chile and as a legal advisor for the Chilean president. His research includes work on international emissions trading. Professor Toledo holds a law degree from Stanford.
1994-1995
Maria Ester Chamorro (El Salvador) is originally from Honduras, but currently resides in El Salvador, where she teaches courses in linguistics and literature at the Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador. She received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex, in the United Kingdom, and is married to Ruben Zamora.
Carlos Figueroa Ibarra (Guatemala/Mexico) is originally from Guatemala, but currently resides in Mexico where he is a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. While at Stanford he conducted research for his doctoral thesis on Central American political processes, entitled Central American in the years of crisis: 1978-1991. He also conducted research for his book, State, Society and Workers in Guatemala in the 20th century. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Sociology from the UNAM, and has published a number of books and articles on agrarian workers, state terror, and political crisis and reform in Central America.
Gregory Greenway (United States) spent a year as a CLAS visiting scholar while completing his Ph.D. in Political Science at Stanford. His dissertation was entitled Democratization and Social Policy in Mexico: The Case of the National Solidarity Program. Greenway also received an M.A. in Political Science from Stanford, and a B.A. in Development Studies at UC-Berkeley.
Douglas Libby (Brazil) is a professor of history at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil and directs the graduate program in history there. He has published widely on 19th-century Brazilian history and has written two major books on slavery in Brazil. During his time at Stanford he conducted investigative research towards his project on Brazilian slavery and proto-industry and also spoke at a roundtable discussion at CLAS on the history of Brazilian slavery.
Gino Lofredo (Ecuador) is a writer and journalist who has worked for the European and Latin American Press and has edited Chasqui, the quarterly Latin American journal on media and development. As a CLAS visiting scholar, he conducted research on contemporary Latin American literature. He also covered the 1995 Peru-Ecuador war from the Amazon and from Quito, and subsequently gave a presentation at Bolivar house on the role of the press in the conflict. Lofredo earned a B.S. in Industrial Engineering at UC-Berkeley and an M.A. in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has worked for a number of international development NGOs.
Maria Luisa Ramos (Spain) earned a doctorate in Latin American Studies at the Instituto Ortega y Gasset in Madrid, Spain, before which she earned a degree in political science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She came to Stanford to conduct research on her thesis about political reform and decentralization in Venezuela. She has authored a number of papers on politics in Latin America and is now a professor of political science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.
Anna Carolina Regner (Brazil) is a professor of philosophy at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. She spent her time at Stanford conducting research in her field of the history and philosophy of biology. Professor Regner received her degree in the history and philosophy of science at UNICAMP, Campinas State Univeristy, Sao Paulo, Brazil. She has written several books on Darwin in Brazil as well as a number of other articles on similar topics.
Ademar Romeiro (Brazil) is a professor of economics at Campinas State University in Brazil. He received his Ph.D. in Economics at the School of High Studies in Social Sciences in Paris and has written extensively on topics including agrarian reform and sustainable development.
Joel Simon (United States) came to CLAS as a media fellow. He has worked as editor of Pacific News Service and SF Weekly, covering Mexico and Central America. He has also written articles on Mexico for the San Francisco Examiner, and collaborated with ABC's Prime Time Live on a segment about Guatemala. Joel Simon earned his B.A. in Spanish and American Studies and an M.A. in Latin American Studies at Amherst College. More recently, he authored a book, Endangered Mexico, on environmental degradation in Mexico.
Hazel Smith (United Kingdom) is currently a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick, where she directs the M.A. program. She received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 1992 and was a Fulbright scholar and visiting fellow at Stanford University, where she worked on research related to European Community foreign policy towards Central America. Since her time at Stanford, she has worked for the UN World Food Program in North Korea and has also worked in Washington, DC as Jennings Randolph Visiting Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.
Bill Summerhill (United States) was a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford's History Department. He earned his B.A. in Political Science and his M.A. in History at the University of Florida, and his research interests include modern Latin America and economics. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on railroads and the Brazilian economy before 1914 and has also written about economies of scale and concentration in Cuban sugar production. Currently he is a professor of history at UCLA and chairs the department's program on Brazil.
Ruben Zamora Rivas (El Salvador) is perhaps most well-known for his presidential candidacy in El Salvador's 1994 elections. He is a professor of political science at the National University of El Salvador and also holds a post at the Central American University as well as at the San Carlos University in Guatemala. He holds a law degree from the University of El Salvador and a degree in government and politics from Essex University in Great Britain. He also worked on the Peace and Justice National Commission in El Salvador at the end of the civil war, and founded the Social Christian Popular Movement Party (MPSC) in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s he served as vice-president of the National Assembly and founded the National Commission for Peace (COPAZ). During his stay at Stanford, he participated in an ongoing workshop on democratization hosted by CLAS.
1993-1994
Arturo Arias (Guatemala) is a former professor at San Francisco State Univeristy, and now directs Latin American Studies at the University of Redlands in California. He is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter; he co-wrote the screenplay for the film El Norte (1984) and the novel After the Bombs (1990). He has also written numerous scholarly pieces on identity, ethnicity and culture in Central America. During his time at Stanford, Arias worked on a book of literary criticism of Central American writers. Since his year with CLAS, Arias has gone on to write extensively on ethnicity and subaltern identity, themes which appear prominently in both his fiction and academic work. He has also written a book about the Rigoberta Menchú controversy and, from 2001-2003, served as president of the Latin American Studies Association.
Charles J. Beirne, S.J. (El Salvador) is a professor of Education at the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. He spent his time at Bolivar House completing a book on the history of the UCA, particularly the story of the six Jesuit priests assassinated there in 1989, and conducted research on educational problems and reform in the developing world. He received his Ph.D. in Education at Fordham University and has served as administrator in numerous universities and high schools in the United States and Latin America. At Stanford, Father Beirne also gave lectures on the then-recent peace process in El Salvador.
Ana Sofia Cardenal Izquierdo (Spain) received her doctorate from the University of Barcelona, where she is now a professor of political science. During her stay at CLAS from 1993-1995, she researched the democratic transition processes in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and conducted field research in El Salvador in 1994, working with various international agencies located there. Before completing her graduate studies she worked as a journalist in Spain.
Rainer Enrique Hamel (Chile/Mexico) is Chilean by birth, but resides in Mexico, where he is a professor of linguistics in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma Mentropolitana Iztapalapa in Mexico City. His major research interests in sociolinguistics include multicultural approaches to bilingual education and contact and conflict between Spanish and indigenous languages. During his time at Stanford, Dr. Hamel researched bilingual indigenous education in Mexico and conducted comparative studies with similar projects in California.
Mario Handler (Uruguay/Venezuela) is a native of Uruguay residing in Venezuela He is a professor and prestigious filmmaker. He came to Stanford in winter of 1994 to conduct a workshop on Latin American documentary film and his visit included a showing and discussion of his feature film Mestizo. He has directed and produced dozens of films and has won nearly twenty prizes in regional and international film festivals over several decades.
Maria Teresa Sierra (Mexico) is a professor of anthropology at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social in Mexico City. As a visiting scholar at Stanford she worked on a research project about customary and state law among the Nahua indigenous group in Puebla, Mexico. Maria Teresa received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Paris, and has published a number of books and articles related to history, cultural discourse, and indigenous groups in Latin America.
Osvaldo Sala (Argentina) is a professor of ecology, in the School of Agronomics at the University of Buneos Aires. His research interests include sustainable land use and climate change. He holds an undergraduate degree in agronomic engineering from the University of Buenos Aires, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Science from Colorado State University.
Salvador Samayoa (El Salvador) was a philosophy professor at the Central American University in San Salvador and has published a number of articles on education reform. In 1979, he served briefly as Minister of Education, before resigning in protest against the government-led repression occurring at that time. He played an important role in the 1992 peace accords, which brought him to Stanford for a 1993 conference on resolution of the civil conflict in El Salvador. Since then he has initiated various projects and plans for development and advocacy for youth and marginalized communities in El Salvador. To date, his most recent work is the book La Reforma Pactada: Conflicto y Paz en El Salvador.
Robert Slenes (Brazil) is a professor of history at Campinas State University (UNICAMP) in Brazil. During his time as a visiting scholar at CLAS, he worked on several research projects related to slavery in Brazil. Professor Slenes earned his Ph.D. in History from Stanford and has taught at the University of New Mexico, the University of Colarado, the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, and at Duke University.
1992-1993
Silvia Gerschman (Brazil) came to CLAS from the University of Campinas in Rio de Janeiro to conduct research for her doctoral dissertation on health care and public policy in Brazil. Her work studied the role of various medical organizations in the process of representing and implementing health policies in Brazil in the late 1980s. She also holds degrees in philosophy from the National University of Buenos Aires, and in political science from the State of Rio de Janeiro University Institute of Research.
Hazel Smith (Great Britain) is Reader in International Relations and director of the M.A. in International Relations at the University of Warwick. She received her doctorate from the London School of Economics in 1992 and was a Fulbright scholar and visiting fellow at Stanford University in 1994-95. Between 2000 and 2002, Dr. Smith was on research leave, first in DPR Korea (North Korea) working for UN World Food Programme, and from 2001-2002 in Washington, DC as Jennings Randolph Visiting Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.
1991-1992
Douglas Murray (Nicaragua) is an expert on the impact of pesticide use in the developing world. He has worked in Nicaragua for a number of years, advising the government's Ministry of Labor on pesticide safety policies and directing CARE International's public health and safety program, and has served as a consultant for a number of governmental and non-governmental organizations throughout Latin America. During his time at Stanford he continued his research on pesticides and development in Central America and gave a presentation on the topic.
Rigoberto Ocampo Alcantar (Mexico) came to CLAS as a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the Sorbonne in Paris. He conducted research on the crises related to the corporatist model of the Mexican political system. He received his undergraduate education in economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Rev. Robert Pelton, CSC (United States) is director of the Institute for Pastoral and Social Ministry at the University of Notre Dame. He spent a year at Stanford during which time he researched the role of the Catholic Church in Latin America for his book From Power to Communion: Latin America Returns the Favor. He has published many articles about religious spirituality and the Catholic Church in Brazil. While at Stanford he gave a presentation, Lights and Shadows for the Latin American Church, on the bishops' conference at Santo Domingo in 1992.
1990-1991
Ramon Gonzalez (Guatemala/Mexico) is Guatemalan by birth, but lives in Chiapas, Mexico. During his time at Stanford, he researched state authoritarianism and the indigenous population of Guatemala, as well as the history of the border region between Chiapas and Guatemala. Before coming to Stanford, he worked with the Mexican Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology to implement plans for development and conservation of the rain forest in the Chiapas-Guatemala border region, and with the Chiapan Institute of Culture to research the survival strategies and cultural reproduction of the indigenous people in that region. Gonzalez holds degrees in social anthropology from the University of San Carlos in Guatemala and the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico.
Mauricio Tenorio (Mexico) is currently a professor of history at the University of Texas-Austin, where he teaches courses on Latin American history. As a doctoral fellow at CLAS, he worked on his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled The Craft of Nationalism: Mexico and International Exhibitions. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Stanford and has written numerous papers on history, culture and identity in the Americas.
1989-1990
Javier A. Elguea (Mexico) spent a year at Stanford on a McArthur Fellowship in Peace Studies and International Security Stanford conducting research on the ways in which organized violence and the use of force have been legitimized and/or morally justified in Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century. Originally from Mexico, he received two M.A. degrees from Stanford, in Philosophy of Social Sciences and Communications, as well as a Ph.D. in the Sociology of Development.
Pilar Ramirez-Grossman holds degrees in public administration and psychology from Harvard and the New School for Social Research, respectively. She directs the Centro de Fomento a Iniciativas Economicas (FIE), a non-profit organization working to finance and train low-income groups and organizations in La Paz, Bolivia. While at Stanford, she led a workshop on grassroots development in South America.
Maria Celia Toro (Mexico) spent three months at CLAS on a Fulbright grant to work on her Ph.D. dissertation in political science. Currently, she directs the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México, Mexico City, where she is also a professor of International Relations.
1988-1989
Carmen Ruiz Martinez (Spain) was a graduate student in anthropological sciences from the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain, when she spent two quarters at Stanford conducting research in her specialization of prehistoric archaeology.
This page last updated September 22, 2009