News and Announcements

As part of her term as Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Rutgers History Professor Camilla Townsend hosted "The Cantares Mexicanos at the Library of Congress" conference. The conference, held on May 8th and 9th, was attended by History Ph.D. candidate Joshua Anthony and two of Townsend's former students: Peter Sorensen, now an assistant professor in History at Hong Kong Baptist University, and Tara...

Marcy Schwartz, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese who specializes in 20th century Latin American literature and culture, has recently published Páginas públicas: Leer en el paisaje callejero de América Latina, the Spanish translation of her 2018 book Public Pages: Reading along the Latin American Streetscape. Páginas públicas explores literary reading programs in urban areas that are open to the public and prompt collective reading experiences. From institutional...

Nathan Darmiento won the James R. Scobie Award from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH). This grant is designed to fund a pre-dissertation research trip dealing with any facet in Latin American history. Darmiento will be using these funds for a summer in Mexico City's Archivo General de la Nación where he plans to research presidential files, agrarian records, and national security archives related to the Lacandón jungle in the second half of the 20th century. Darmiento will also...

Evelyn Autry's article "Insurgent Memories of Armed Struggle: Self-Representation by Female Ex-combatants in Peru" has been published by Duke Press in the Meridians special issue "Indigenous Feminisms across the World: Part 2", which exposes, challenges, and actively resists contemporary (i.e., settler) colonial realities. Autry's article presents testimonies from former combatant women incarcerated for treason to examine how they represent themselves as complex victims and survivors of...

Laura De Moya-Guerra, doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, presented her research at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS), held April 24–26 at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City, Mexico. Her paper, titled “From Laundromats to Congress: The Rise of Anti-Chinese Discourses and Laws in Early Twentieth-Century Colombia (1903–1931),” represents the first chapter of her dissertation. De Moya-Guerra participated in the panel “Modern...

The Andean-Amazonian Studies Work Group at Rutgers University hosted their inaugural Andean-Amazonia Symposium on April 25, 2025. This even was a successful exchange of research within the Rutgers community and outside it, including colleagues from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Brazil and a delegation of faculty and grad students from Stony Brook University. The cohort of Stony Brook University academics were very impressed with the event and suggested doing a similar event there next year, with...

Rutgers Ph.D. student Sandra Acocal has won the Irving Stoddard Kull Memorial Traveling Fellowship for Premodern Historical Studies. This competitive award is given by the Rutgers History Department and can be used to cover costs of research travel and costs of field-specific technical training (language instruction, paleography, critical bibliography, digital humanities-related work, etc.). Sandra Acocal will use the award to cover part of her research expenses in Spain, where she will work...

Joshua Anthony, a Rutgers Ph.D. Candidate in History, has won the Richard S. Dunn Dissertation Fellowship from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Joshua Anthony's work focuses on Mexican ethnohistory during the late Aztec and early colonial periods, specifically the Nahuatl annals, alphabetic histories based on glyphic and oral accounts that were written down by the Aztecs and their neighbors after the Spanish invasion. This fellowship will provide him...

Alex Liebman recently defended their dissertation in Geography, working with Drs. Kevon Rhiney (committee chair), Andrea Marston, Jamaal Wright (University of Florida), and Anthony Dest (Lehman College - CUNY). The dissertation, titled Cannabis, cane, and campesinxs: Identification, resistance, and negotiation at the plantation interface in northern Cauca, Colombia, traces how mestizx campesinxs living in the Andean foothills directly overlooking a sugarcane-dominated plantation valley...

Rosa Emilia Cordero Cruz, History PhD student at Rutgers University, and Laura Quiñones Navarro, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, present their Black Puerto Rican Colección Project: A Guide to Afro-Caribbean History Through the Objects and Artifacts Found in the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña’s Fine Arts Collection. On September 22, 2023, Cruz's interdisciplinary group, the Caribbean Working Group at Rutgers, organized a hybrid archival tour of the Fine Arts Program of the Instituto de...

Rutgers Newark professor Paul Boxer and Temple University professor Franklin Moreno publish their article "Advancing a transnational ecological systems framework for research on exposure to violence".   Scholars have underscored the need to integrate research from more diverse contexts and local realities across national borders to inform global perspectives on developmental science. As multination developmental studies have increased, one area requiring further attention is the ways in which...

Professor Antonio Hernandez-Matos, an instructor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, recently presented his paper "To Be or Not to Be Modern: Fashion, Gender, and Ambiguity Towards Modernity in Early 20th Century Puerto Rico” at the Fashion/Media: Power and Possibility Conference in Dallas, Texas on February 28-March 1, 2025. He was part of a panel titled "Structures and Barriers of Fashion". Panelists of Structures and Barriers of Fashion, Fashion and Media, Power and...

Over spring break, eight Masters in Social Work (MSW) students, guided by Dr. Elsa Candelario, traveled to Puerto Rico for a 10-day immersive study abroad experience. They engaged with human service organizations, connected with Puerto Rican social work students and professionals, attended the NASW-PR conference, and took part in rich cultural experiences across the island. The trip proved to be deeply meaningful—described by several students as one of the most impactful moments of their MSW...

The upcoming 2025 Andean and Amazonian Symposium will feature Américo Mendoza Mori, Ph.D., Harvard University as keynote speaker. He will be giving a presentation on "Global and Migrant Indigeneity: Quechua Language Reclamation in the Andes and Beyond”. In the lead up to the symposium, Dr. Mori sat down with event organizer Paul Montjoy Forti for an interview about the Quechua language. Read the interview below. 1. What role do Indigenous languages, like Quechua, play in Latin American and...

Several CLAS affiliated faculty, PhD candidates, and PhD students presented at the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies (MACLAS) Conference held on March 28-29, 2025 at the University of Delaware. The conference theme was "Writing to the Future: Emerging Trends in Latin American Studies". PhD Candidate Laura De Moya-Guerra and PhD Student Nathan Darmiento were also presented with the Christina Turner Graduate Student Travel Award. The presentations are listed below: "Everyday Life in the...

On Thursday, March 27, 2025, Jian Ren successfully defended his dissertation titled "Dancing at the Periphery: Knowledge and Experiments in China-Latin America Relations, 1949-1989". The dissertation committee consisted of committee chair Kathleen López and members David Foglesong, Aldo Lauria-Santiago, and Adrian Hearn of the University of Melbourne.  “Dancing at the Periphery” explores the evolving relationship between China and Latin America from 1949 to 1989. Drawing on a wide range of...

The Center of Latin American Studies has released the list of the Spring 2025 CLAS/RAICCS Student Research Grant Recipients. These competitive grants support the research work of Rutgers students interested in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, including the non-Hispanophone Caribbean. The list of recipients can be viewed below and more information about their projects can be found here. Gloria D' Alession Nathan Darmiento Leonardo Calzada Jeffrey Aizprua Javiera Madrid-Salazar Santos...

Dario Hernan Vasquez Padilla has won a teaching competition and is now assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Colombia (UNAL). He started the position in January of this year and in the future, he will be teaching courses in the structure of modern society, sociological theory, and quantitative methods. Professor Padilla will continue working on research similar to what he was doing as a postdoc here at Rutgers, including work related to historical...

Cronoscopia: A Digital Observatory of Latin American Futures During her time as a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University, Ariela Parisi was awarded the Digital Humanities Seed Grant from the Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative. With this grant, she developed Cronoscopia, a digital platform that explores the intersections of memory, speculation, and future imaginaries in Latin America. The platform serves as a space for critical engagement with speculative aesthetics, environmental justice,...

Rutgers professors Alyvia Walters and Regina Marchi have published the article "From local tragedy to national news: Twitter, anti-immigrant discourse, and the weaponization of public grief online" in the Atlantic Journal of Communication. This article discusses anti-immigrant discourse on Twitter related to the 2018 murder of a 20-year-old White woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant. Additionally, it examines how the news narrative of her death was "usurped by Donald Trump...

Read below for a quick introduction to the summer study abroad program in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This program includes Portuguese language classes, history, and culture courses at PUC-Rio, along with guided tours to historical sites and museums. Some classes will be faculty-led by Isadora Grevan De Carvalho, while others will be taught by PUC professors. PUC-Rio has extensive experience in hosting international students and they provide a secure and well-structured environment, including...

CLAS member Kim D. Butler (Africana Studies/History) has been named a 2025 recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to complete a book on Black Power as it expressed itself through Black carnival groups known as Blocos Afros. Blocos Afros are a distinct form of carnival performance created in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil during the nation’s last military dictatorship (1964-1985) when a group of young people founded Ilê Aiyê (loosely, “House of the World” in Yoruba). In the...

On February 19th, Latino & Caribbean Studies Associate Professor, Kaysha Corinealdi, gave a keynote address at the Inter-American Studies Association's bi-annual meeting held at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) with the co-sponsorship of the Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte (CISAN). The theme of the conference was "Futuros Posibles en las Américas/Possible Futures in the Americas. Professor Corinealdi's talk entitled "Afrosolidaridad en las Américas" focused on...

Rutgers Global has announced their "Year of Latin America and The Caribbean" study abroad program. Ready to explore vibrant cultures and rich histories while studying in Latin America and the Caribbean? This is your chance!  Study abroad in six incredible locations: Argentina (Buenos Aires), Barbados (Bridgetown, UWI Cave Hill), Chile (Santiago), Costa Rica (Monteverde), Mexico (Mérida, Yucatán), and Uruguay (Montevideo). Rutgers students enjoy exclusive benefits, $1,500 flight credits, free...

The open call for proposals to visit the University of Florida Libraries for research is open now, with applications being accepted until March 10, 2025. The UF Center for Latin American Studies offers library access grants for scholars funded by a Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The grants are to enable faculty from qualified U.S. colleges and universities to access the extensive resources of the UF Latin American and Caribbean Collection.  For more...

Rutgers PhD candidate Joshua Anthony has won one of the 5 available SAS (School of Arts and Sciences) Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowships, offered by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant to Rutgers PhD candidates in the humanities. This grant will provide Joshua Anthony with additional funding for the 2025-2026 academic year, which will allow him to finish his dissertation, "A Nahua Family History: Kinship, Colonialism, and Indigenous Histography in Early Mexico, 1464-1629.”  This...

Rutgers PhD student Sandra Acocal has published an article titled "Ritual para los Niños Dios entre los nahuas de San Pablo del Monte Cuauhtotoatla, Tlaxcala" in the journal Dimensión Anthropológica. This article emphasizes the importance of researching the youth of societies as part of their histories and development. It specifically explores the childhood and youth of the nahuas of San Pablo del Monte Cuauhtotoatla. The active participation in the life of their people is expressed in the...

Latinas/os in New Jersey Book Launch and Conference Friday February 21 at the Alexander Library TLC Room, 169 College Ave. Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Please RSVP for the Conference. Rutgers University Press will have the book for sale!

CLAS professors Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Ulla Berg were interviewed and featured in an article on The Daily Targum, an independent news organization for the Rutgers community. The article discusses the recent publishing of their book Latinas/os in New Jersey and the significance of this book for the Rutgers community and the wider community of Latinos. Professor Berg recounts the motivations behind making this book by stating that "We want to show that Latino communities have, for at least the last...

The Rutgers/PRAC Graduate Student Summer Internship Program offers participants unparalleled access to archival collections, as well as invaluable interactions with the esteemed staff at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico (AGPR), the Colección Puertorriqueña (CPR) at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) and other participating host sites. Over the course of eight or nine weeks, interns will engage in a multifaceted experience, combining hands-on work at their host institution with dedicated...

The CLAS Andean-Amazonian Studies Work Group at Rutgers University, New Brunswick invites all graduate students and faculty interested in presenting a 15-minute talk at our inaugural Andean-Amazonia Symposium on April 25, 2025.  We encourage submissions that align with the following fields of study: Literature Indigenous realities and human rights Queer and gender studies  Linguistics Cultural studies Diaspora studies Environmental and blue humanities Public humanities and community engagement Historical...

We are pleased to share that Javier González Cortés, a PhD student in History, has published an article in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo titled "La primera sociedad protectora de animales en Colombia." Timed to coincide with the 137th anniversary of the speech given on January 15, 1888, during the inauguration of Colombia’s first society for the protection of animals, this piece analyzes the significance of that moment and traces a few changes that have happened since then. Javier sheds...

CLAS Director and Professor Aldo Lauria-Santiago and CLAS Executive Committee Member and Associate Professor Ulla Berg have published a new book titled "Latinos/as in New Jersey" alongside 20 other contributors, listed below. This book brings together innovative and empirically grounded scholarship from different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study and addresses topics including the demographic history of Latinos in the state, Latino migration from gateway cities to suburban...

Member of the Center for Latin American Studies, PhD Candidate from the Department of English, and Folger Shakespeare Fellow, Javiera Barrientos, has been awarded as the Bibliographical Society of America's D.F. McKenzie New Scholar. She will present, online and in person, her research “Literary Landfills. Bibliographic Waste and its Representations” , where she examines the circulation, uses and representations of bibliographic waste found in viceregal vellum limp-bindings held at the...

Andrés M. F. González-Saiz recently published his article "Between ‘Reproachable Alterities’ and ‘Irredeemable Others’: Violence, Morality, and the Limits of Ethnographic Understanding". This article critically examines how moral frameworks shape the ethnographic understanding of violence, introducing the categories of "reproachable alterities" and "irredeemable others" to explore the ethical and methodological challenges of studying perpetrators of violence. It draws on ethnographic data...

Professor Ulla Berg was quoted and included in the article "On TikTok, Every Migrant Is Living the American Dream" by Jordan Salaam in The New Yorker. This article was digitally published on January 6, 2025 and in the print edition on the January 13, 2025 issue with the headline “The TikTok Trail.” This article discusses the discrepancy between what immigrants from the Andes region experience in their day-to-day lives living in New York, compared to what they document online on TikTok. It...

On November 14–15, the Universidad del Norte en Barranquilla, Colombia, hosted the inaugural colloquium Caribe Andino: conexiones entre ambiente, paz e identidades culturales. This event marked the first scholarly initiative to examine the historical interconnections between two of Colombia's most distinctive geographic regions: the Caribbean and the Andes. The colloquium brought together historians, anthropologists, and sociologists whose presentations explored the social, cultural, and...

Ariela Parisi successfully defended her dissertation on November 15, passing without revisions. Her dissertation, advised by Dr. Marcy Schwartz, explores the role of collective memory in imagining communal futures. It examines contemporary Latin American cultural expressions—performances, films, and novels—that engage in what Parisi terms retro-speculation. These works revisit the past to envision emancipatory futures while challenging the notion of time as linear and its association with...

Emma Oslé, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and former lecturer in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, recently earned the Big 10 Academic Alliance/Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in American Art with the Smithsonian Museum. The Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program (SIFP) offers the Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellowship to doctoral candidates who are enrolled in one of the Big Ten Academic Alliance universities. The specific fellowship...

This past Friday, November 15, 2024, the Center of Latin American Studies hosted their Fall 2024 Research Symposium, in which several Rutgers graduate students, PhD Candidates, and post-docs presented their work on Latin America. Below you'll find a list of presenters, as well as a link to read their abstracts, and pictures from the event. Presenters:Laura De Moya-GuerraSandra AcocalVierelina FernandezGabriela DuncanJian RenJavier GonzalezNia CambridgeJaviera BarrientosAlexander...

Dalia Griñan has won the Lydia Cabrera Award for her paper "Tracing Intimate Knowledge: African Women in Nineteenth Century Urban Cuba". The Lydia Cabrera Award was awarded by the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and aims to support the study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868. Rutgers faculty member Kathleen Lopez is also the Chair of the Prize Committee for this award.  Griñan is a PhD student in the Rutgers New Brunswick History department with concentrations in Atlantic/Diaspora and Gender...

Please read below for a message from the State of New Jersey's Center for Hispanic Policy, Research and Development (CHPRD) Program Development Assistant, Arely Hernandez, MHS: I’m pleased to share that the Center for Hispanic Policy, Research, and Development (CHPRD) is currently inviting applications for the 2025 class of the Governor’s Hispanic Fellows Program. We are aiming for the largest class in the program’s history, welcoming 35 students to participate in leadership development and...

Professor Ulla Berg, an Associate Professor at the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Anthropology, has received a fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, alongside fellow Rutgers faculty Jessey Choo, Marisa J. Fuentes, Eric Gawiser, and Alex Kontorovich.  Berg's research  focuses on historical and contemporary processes and experiences of migration and mobility within Latin America and between this region and the United States. She has...

Dr. Evelyn Saavedra Autry received her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia. Her research creates a conversation between various fields of knowledge, particularly Indigenous epistemologies, and pedagogies, literature, cultural studies on (de)coloniality, and gender studies, through the analysis of Andean women’s identity formations. In her current book project, Race, Gender, and Memory in Narratives of the Andes, Dr...

The Center of Latin American Studies extends a warm welcome to several new affiliate faculty members from the Rutgers Newark and Camden campuses. A brief biography of each faculty member is outlined below. Juan Arredondo: Juan Arredondo is a Colombian American documentary photographer who has chronicled human rights and conflict in Colombia, Venezuela, and Central America. Since 2014, he has been reporting on the use of child soldiers by illegal armed groups in Colombia, the peace agreement between...

Kaysha Corinealdi is  the author of Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2022), with other publications in Radical History Review, Public Books, the American Historical Review, Social Text, The Washington Post, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and more. She is currently on the editorial board of the Global Black Thought journal and the University of North Carolina Press Latinx History Series and is an active member of the...

The American Society for Ethnohistory held their annual meeting, which was titled this year as "Colonial (dis)Entanglements", on September 18-21 in Fargo, North Dakota. Several Rutgers PhD candidates and graduates were in attendance, including: Celso Armando Mendoza, Bridge to Faculty postdoc at the University of Illinois Chicago and a recent Rutgers History PhD graduate; Joshua Anthony, current Rutgers History PhD candidate; Clio Isaacson, current Rutgers History PhD candidate; Peter...

Professor Shantee Rosado has co-written a book with four other Black feminist sociologists who form the group The Cardi B Collective. The book, titled The Sociology of Cardi B: A Trap Feminist Approach, creatively engages with the topics of Black and Latinx femininity, motherhood, sexuality, racial and ethnic identity, and political engagement through the life and artistic work of Hip Hop artist Cardi B. By centering the lived experiences and social positions of the Black women Cardi...