Center for Latin American Studies

Welcome to the New Academic Year!

Dear colleagues and students,

CLAS welcomes the new academic year, my second as director. This year we will continue to build on the work done by former director Ulla Berg and during my first year. Despite some financial restrictions for this coming year (we rely on winter session enrolments for a good part of our budget) we will continue to support our core and new programs:

• CLAS and the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies will host a start of year reception on Thursday September 22, 5-6:30PM. Please join us in Lucy Stone Hall (Livingston Campus)!!
• Last year we created six new Working Groups, this year one more is coming.  Working groups now have assigned budgets, coordinators, and a clear mission. 
• Standby for a major conference in September (22-23) on Mexican Indigenous History organized by Board of Governors Professor Camilla Townsend and co-sponsored by the CLAS and the History Department.
• The Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration blossomed this summer through the participation of colleagues from Yale, and will expand by bringing in support from other colleagues at Princeton and the University of Connecticut, and from corporate and Humanities foundations in Puerto Rico. I spent a good part of the summer developing this work and it promises to be a very rewarding experience for all involved. Rutgers History graduate student Rosa Cordero participated in the work.  You can sign up for the email list that provides updates.
• Our incoming Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dr. Briana Nichols will be teaching our intro. course this fall and will organize a program on Central America for Spring semester.  We are also hosting a visiting scholar, Ph.D. candidate in history, Jennifer Carcamo from UCLA.
• The CLAS continues to provide sections of our 101 Introduction to Latin America course.  We also offer a few advanced courses of our own taught by instructors and our Postdoctoral Associate. We cross list all and any courses on Latin America, the Caribbean, and most courses in Latino Studies.  Keep us posted on your courses.
• Faculty are also cooking up a program on the elections in Brazil while grad students are working on a collaborative history workshop with Princeton graduate students in history.  And the Caribbean Working Group already has a meeting and other events planned. Stay tuned and join their email lists.
• We will hold an all-inclusive research conference in Spring where faculty and graduate students will present their work, including the many graduate students who received financial support from the Center in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
• The CLAS will hold its annual graduate student research grant competition. 
• We will continue to support faculty-initiated programs including a series on prisons and incarceration in Latin American organized by Professors Berg and Leon and our continued collaboration with the Latino Studies Research Initiative.
• We will also continue sharing a biweekly email for external online events, so we don't overburden your inbox with single emails.
• Web page upgrades and inclusion will continue this year.  Check out our events page and news page.
• The CLAS Executive Committee will continue to consider reforms to our various functions as well as finding external sources of support for the CLAS. Standby for the replacement election for the EC in the next two weeks.
• Maria Ealey has continued to administer our Center’s needs, despite the absence of one shared staff person since January. Our wonderful student assistants and student reps will help build our programs and channel suggestions.
• Send us your news, events, publications, and photos.  We are committed to making faculty and student work on Latin America and the Caribbean visible.

Interested in getting more involved? 

Organize a program, join or propose a Working Group, serve as file reader for the research grants, or in-class evaluation for our instructors, or run for our Board, help us identify new faculty and graduate students within your departments, programs or schools....Travelled South or did research this summer? Send us your pictures and a short description of your work!

Looking forward to all this!

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Director