Latin America and the Caribbean Advisory Board biographies
Holly Ackerman is the Librarian for Latin America and Iberia at Duke University. Her research established the foundational demography and history of the 1994 Cuban raft crisis. More 
She has also published works on Cuba"s political prisoners, exile communities, Cuban national reconciliation and various topics related to post-1980 Cuban migration. Her work has appeared in "Cuban Studies; Encuentro de la cultura cubana";and "Latino Studies". She has produced three digital archives on Cuban themes. Dr. Ackerman served as the country specialist on Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic for Amnesty International in the United States from1999 to 2006 and continues to consult with their Co-Group Program. She is an advisor to the International Coalition on Sites of Conscience for their Guantánamo Public Memory Project.
Aquiles Alencar-Brayner (PhD, King's College – University of London) worked as a lecturer of Latin American Studies at Birkbeck College and University of Leeds before assuming the post of Curator of the Latin American Collections at the British Library. More
He is currently working as Curator of Digital Research and Scholarship, managing digitization projects, implementation of digital resources and development of e-research tools at the British Library. He is a member of the peer review committee for the ESRC (Economic and Social Sciences Research Council) in the UK and the author of Literature of the Senses (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009). His research interests include contemporary Latin American literature, Latin American history, and Brazilian music. In 2009 he was awarded the Medal José Mindlin for Cultural Achievement in recognition of his work on raising the profile of Brazilian culture in the UK.
William H. Beezley established a reputation as the pioneer cultural historian of Mexico with the publication of his well-known book, "Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico." More
His investigations in both Mexican and Latin American history have resulted in numerous books, including the standard "Oxford History of Mexico," edited with Michael C. Meyer. He and Judy Ewell focused on the lives of ordinary people in their widely used text, "The Human Tradition in Latin America" that resulted in a series on the Human Tradition in other places. His most recent books are "Mexican National Identity: Memory, Innuendo, and Popular Culture," and "Mexicans in Revolution" with Colin MacLachlan. Recently, his research has turned to wine in Latin America and he has appeared as a guest on the Emmy-award winning program "The Desert Speaks" to discuss wine in Baja California del Norte and in Chile. He has begun a book on the Malbec varietal in the Americas. His Mexican investigations now focus on the administration of José Vasconcelos as Minister of Public Education, 1921-1924. As Professor of history, he teaches at the University of Arizona, and as distinguished visiting professor at El Colegio de México, and he serves as co-director of the Oaxaca Summer Institute.
David Block is Bibliographer for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas, where he earned a Ph.D. in history and an MLIS.
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Before returning to Texas in 2009, he was Latin American Librarian at Cornell University for twenty-five years. He has been active in the Latin American Studies Association and the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), twice a Fulbright scholar, and a member of several scholarly societies in Bolivia. His Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon (University of Nebraska Press) won the Council of Latin American History's Howard Cline Memorial Prize in 1995.
Catherine M. Conaghan is Professor of Political Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She received her PhD from Yale University and is the author of numerous works on Andean politics including her most recent book, "Fujimori's Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). More
Her publications have appeared in the "Journal of Democracy, the International Journal of Press/Politics, the Latin American Research Review" and the "Journal of Latin American Studies." She has been a visiting researcher at the Helen Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, and the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Ecuador. In 2000, she held the Knapp Chair of Liberal Arts at the University of San Diego. Her research has received support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Counsel of Canada, the North-South Center, and the Fulbright-Hays program. She has served on the editorial board of the "Latin American Research Review, the International Journal of Press/Politics" and the "Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture". She is the co-editor of the Pitt Latin American Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her current research focuses on the politics of presidential corruption trials in Latin America.
Paula Covington is Latin American and Iberian Bibliographer at the Vanderbilt University Libraries and a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies. More
She has taught Latin American Research Methods for more than three decades, and is the author of an award-winning work, "Latin America and the Caribbean: A Research Guide", a research project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Paula is past president of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), an international organization focused on the development of research services and library collections of Latin Americana. She has twice received the José Toribio Medina award for a distinguished monograph in Latin American Studies. Paula received her degrees from Syracuse University and Vanderbilt University in Latin American history and studied at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is a participant in an NEH-funded project to preserve and digitize colonial Latin American slave society records (Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies). Her principal research interest is 19th-century women travelers to Latin America.
Jorge Duany is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. More
During the spring of 2010, he was a Scholar in Residence at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut. During the fall of 2009, he was the Wilbur Marvin Visiting Fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. In 2007, he was the Bacardí Family Eminent Scholar in Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He previously served as Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Director of the journal Revista de Ciencias Sociales, Visiting Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at the University of Michigan, and Assistant Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has also been a Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
He earned his Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, with a concentration in anthropology, at the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University. He has published extensively on Caribbean migration, ethnicity, race, nationalism, and trans-nationalism. He recently co-edited a volume on Puerto Rican Florida (2010) and How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences (2009). He previously published La nación en vaivén: Identidad, migración y cultura popular en Puerto Rico (2010) and The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (2002). He is the coauthor of Puerto Ricans in Orlando and Central Florida (2006), Cubans in Puerto Rico: Ethnic Economy and Cultural Identity (1997), and El Barrio Gandul: Economía subterránea y migración indocumentada en Puerto Rico (1995). He is also the author of Quisqueya on the Hudson: The Transnational Identity of Dominicans in Washington Heights (1994/2008). Since February 2003, he writes a monthly editorial column for the newspaper El Nuevo Día.
Silvia María Hirsch — M. A. And Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California in Los Angeles, 1991. More
Professor and Researcher in the Master"s Program in Social and Political Anthropology at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Argentina.
Professor and Researcher at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, in Buenos Aires
Professor at the New York University Program in Buenos Aires.
Publications
Books:
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Movilizaciones indígenas e identidades en disputa en la Argentina: historias de invisibilización y re-emergencia. Gastón Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch, editors Editorial La Crujía, 2010.
- Educación Intercultural Bilingüe en Argentina: Identidades, Lenguas y Protagonistas, Silvia Hirsch y Adriana Serrudo, editors. Novedades Educativas, Buenos Aires, 2010.
- Mujeres Indígenas de la Argentina. Cuerpo, trabajo y poder. Silvia Hirsch, editor. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2008.
- El pueblo tapiete de Argentina: Historia y Cultura. Instituto de Lingüística, Universidad de Buenos Aires. 2006.
- Contributing editor of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, Library of Congress, Ethnology, South America: Lowlands. Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia.
Articles:
- Indigenous Struggles and the Contested Identities in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence. Silvia Hirsch y Gastón Gordillo, Journal of Latin American Anthropology Volume 8, Number 3, 2003. pp4-30
- Bilingualism, Pan-Indianism and Politics in Northern Argentina: the Guaraní's struggle for identity and recognition . Journal of Latin American Anthropology
Consulting:
- Anthropological Consulting for Dengue control, Foundation Mundo Sano, 2010Consulting, for TV series on Indigenous Peoples, Channel Encuentro, Ministry of Education, 2007-2008, Buenos Aires.
- Scholar-in-residence. Teacher"s Training. Latin America: an interdisciplinary approach National Endowment for the Humanities-Dodge Foundation,Scholar in Residence program. Emerson High School, New Jersey, 2001.
Erick D. Langer (Ed. in chief) is Professor of the Edmund J. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a member of the History Department at Georgetown University since 1999. More
Previously he taught for fourteen years in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Latin American History in 1984 at Stanford University. He has published on a variety of topics, including a co-authored text on World History, "Experiencing World History" (2000) and two edited volumes, "The New Latin American Mission History" (with co-editor Robert Jackson) (1995) and "Contemporary Indigenous Movements in Latin America" (2003). He has published widely on Latin American frontiers, including "Expecting Pears from an Elm Tree: Franciscan Missions on the Chiriguano Frontier in the Heart of South America, 1830-1949" (2009), as well as on economic issues and trade in the nineteenth-century Andes. Dr. Langer also was the Senior Editor of the second edition of Gale"s Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (2008).
Peter Manuel has researched and published extensively on musics of India, the Caribbean, Spain, and elsewhere. More
His several books include "Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey" (1988), "Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae" (with K. Bilby and M. Largey, 2006), and "Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean" (2009), along with two documentary videos, including "Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to the Caribbean." Formerly a performer of flamenco guitar, jazz piano, and sitar, he teaches ethnomusicology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Ian Read is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at Soka University of America. More
He has written on the history of the United Fruit Company, elite business networks in Mexico, and slavery and social hierarchies in Brazil. His current research focuses on the causes and consequences of a period of unfamiliar and destructive epidemics that struck Brazil between 1849 and 1899.
Suzel Reily completed her doctoral degree in Social Anthropology in 1990 at the University of Sao Paulo. More
She acted as Chair for the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (2000-2003) and for the Society for Ethnomusicology Council (2003-2005). She is currently completing a monograph based on this material which addresses the musical life of a small former mining town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, from the colonial period to the present. She is also interested in the ways ethnomusicologists and anthropologists might use hypermedia. Her most recent hypermedia venture involved the representation of the Holy Week celebrations in Campanha, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Thomas Ward is Professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies at Loyola University Maryland. More
He has published three books, "La anarquía inmanentista de Manuel González Prada" (New York/Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), "La teoría literaria: romanticismo, krausismo y modernismo ante la "globalización" industrial" (Mississippi: "Romance Monographs," 2004), and "La resistencia cultural: la nación en el ensayo de las Américas" (Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2004). He was one of nine associate editors for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture and he has published some thirty articles in various journals including recently in the "Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, A Contracorriente, Cuban Studies," and the "European Review of Latin American Studies." A recent compilation of his work, "Buscando la nación peruana" (Lima: Horizonte, 2009), looks at the not-so-divergent ways literature and culture represent the Peruvian nation. He has also edited a volume of critical studies on the noted indigenist poet and essayist Manuel González Prada, "El porvenir nos debe una victoria: la insólita modernidad de Manuel González Prada"(Lima: Red para el Desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Perú, 2010). Ward is presently engaged in two long-term research projects: the first attempting to isolate and compare sixteenth- and seventeenth-century indigenous notions of ethnicity and gender as they assemble and reinforce the nation in various hemispheric cultural groups; and the second tracing the influence of the early seventeenth-century author Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in post-Independence Peruvian thought, from Juana Manuela Gorritti to Mario Vargas Llosa.
Stacie G. Widdifield (PhD, UCLA) is a Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona and Affiliated Faculty of Latin American Studies; she teaches Modern and Colonial Mexican art. More
Her research interests include: history, gender, nationalism, and institutions in 19th and early 20th century Mexico. Her publications include: "The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting" (University of Arizona Press); the edited volume, "La Amplitud del Modernismo y la Modernidad" (Conaculta and Curare) as well as articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century Mexican art; her most recent articles are: "Art and Modernity in Porfirian Mexico: Julia Escalante"s "Graziella and the Lechero," "Bulletin of Latin American Research." Volume 29. No.3, pp. 336-353, 2010. "Under Lock and Key: The Making of Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez in 19th Century Mexico," in: "Miradas Disidentes: Géneros y Sexos en la historia del arte." Mexico: IIE, UNAM, 2008, pp.123-141. She is currently co-editing a volume on "Buen Gusto and Classicism in 18th and 19th Century Latin America" with Paul NIell. Her current research focuses on art and medicine in 19thc century Mexico.
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