News and Announcements

Congratulations to Jeffrey Lawrence, Professor of English, for writing and publishing the new book: "El Americano".  Jeffrey is the author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (2018) and the translator of Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America (2016) and Sergio Chejfec’s Forgotten Manuscript (2023). His first novel, El americano, was published by Chatos Inhumanos press in 2024. El Americano Description:  What...

Congratulations to Jian Ren, PhD candidate in History at Rutgers who has been awarded the Susman Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2024-2025, generously provided by the Warren and Beatrice Susman Endowment.  Thanks to the generosity of the late Warren and Beatrice Susman, the Department of History will award two fellowships to support history graduate students during their final year in the History Ph.D. program. Jian has been named one of those two awardees after finishing a competitive...

Congratulations to Lorena Avila Jaimes for successfully defending her dissertation at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers-Newark. Lorena is a recipient of the Center for Latin American Studies Research Grant.   Her work centered on the racialization of migrants with criminal records in U.S. immigration courts in the context of immigration detention. She explored the influence of criminal records, nationality, and access to legal counsel (not guaranteed in immigration proceedings) over...

Rutgers History PhD student, Javier González Cortés, presented his talk titled “Finding Pablo Escobar’s Animals: What Was I Getting Myself Into” on the panel Animal Encounters in the Archive, held at the American Society for Environmental History Conference 2024 in Denver, CO.  Javier’s presentation focused on the challenges faced in obtaining information about the individual animals that the kingpin, Pablo Escobar, brought to his private zoo at the Hacienda Nápoles in the early 1980s, located...

The Center for Latin American Studies takes pride in sharing the recent success of one of its distinguished members, Andrés González-Saiz, in defending his doctoral thesis “A Belligerent Peace: Military Victimhood and Counterinsurgency in Transitional Colombia” on March 22, 2024. As an instructor at the CLAS at Rutgers, Andrés has demonstrated exceptional commitment in the field of cultural anthropology, as well as in studying the issues affecting societies immersed in violent conflicts. Under the...

Sandra Acocal has been selected as a participant in the summer 2024 workshop “Missionary Manuscripts in Mesoamerican Languages,” jointly organized by the Princeton University Library, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Library of Congress. The workshop offers an introduction to the missionary records in Mesoamerican languages, drawing on collection materials from the Garrett-Gates Collection of Mesoamerican Manuscripts at the Princeton University Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Rare Books collection, and selected...

Congratulations to Professor Camilla Townsend for being named the new  Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas at The John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress for 2024-2025.  The Kislak Chair supports in-depth research projects in the disciplines of archaeology, history, cartography, epigraphy, linguistics, ethnohistory, ethnography, bibliography, and sociology, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary projects that combine disciplines in novel and...

The Center for Latin American Studies is very glad to announce the recipients of the CLAS/RAICCS 2024 Graduate student research grants.  This year CLAS collaborated with RAICCS through its Interim Director (and CLAS affiliate), Prof. Kathleen Lopez. We were able to fund most of the applications we received, and we look forward to hearing next year how the research and training we funded proceeded.  Funding for these grants is provided by the School of Arts and Sciences and the income from CLAS...

Call for Articles and Blogs for Website on Latinos in New Jersey  The LSRI issued a call for researchers and community leaders to write research-based blogs with photos, sound clips, maps, and other supplementary material that help us understand the diverse Latino communities of New Jersey.  This material will be part of a website that will accompany the publication of the Rutgers University Press book on Latinos in New Jersey, which Professors Lauria Santiago and Ulla Berg edited. As part of...

Congratulations to Lorena Avila Jaimes and co-author David Ibañez for publishing a research article titled: "An Expensive Pass to Freedom: Bond Amounts Trajectories in Immigration Court" in Sage Journals.  Lorena Avila Jaimes is a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. Her career involves Colombia and Latin America’s state-building and peace-keeping initiatives, working in projects related to comparative international criminal justice, human rights and...

On March 1st, 2024, CLAS hosted another successful reach symposium featuring presentations from Graduate students and Faculty. Most presenters were graduate students who received CLAS small grant almost a year ago. The research symposium was a great opportunity for them to share how they used those funds to conduct research further. Through the funding, one grant recipient was able to collect oral histories from campesino associations in Miranda, Corinto, and Caloto, norte del Cauca, Colombia, with the...

Congratulations to Joshua Anthony for winning the summer fellowship in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. Josh Anthony is a third-year PhD student specializing in Latin American and Global and Comparative History. He studies the indigenous history of colonial Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries using documents written in Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Nahua peoples and once the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire. His research explores the challenges posed by Spanish...

Congratulations to film festival organizers: Samantha Carhuayano,  Meridian Carsky-Wilson,  Amillia Keagle, and Mildred López Escudero for bringing this to unique concept to life. When explaining the motivation behind creating this film festival, Mildred López Escudero, "Although we [the team of organizers] come from different backgrounds and paths in life, we are united by a shared desire to make a positively impact in our communities"  Co-sponsored by CLAS, this film festival features movies...

Congratulations to Professor Andrea Marston for publishing a new book titled: "Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia".  Marston is a human-environment geographer with research and teaching expertise at the intersection of political ecology, political economy, development studies, feminist geography, and science and technology studies.  In Subterranean Matters, Andrea Marston examines the ongoing history of Bolivian mining cooperatives, an...

SELF-FUNDING GRADUATE STUDENTS MAY JOIN THE ARCHIVAL INTERNSHIP AT THE ARCHIVO GENERAL DE PUERTO RICO SPONSORED BY THE PRAC The Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration Summer Graduate Intern Program will be held again in 2024.  This year's dates are from June  10 to July 19. The PRAC has organized summer internships for self-funding participants in 2023 and 2022.   Students spend five weeks working at the AGPR and doing research in Puerto Rico.  At the AGPR they work as volunteer interns organizing...

Congratulations to Ph.D. Student Laura Carolina De Moya-Guerra for publishing a new article, "La viuda migrante de Zahlé y sus hijos: migración árabe a Barranquilla, Colombia, 1900-1945" in the Península Semi-Annual Magazine.  Laura is a  PhD Student in the History Department at Rutgers University. She is interested in migrations and diasporas in Colombia in the XX century, especially in the Colombian Caribbean. Laura received her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (2016) with honors and her...

 Congratulations to Ph.D. student, Leonardo Calzada  for winning the Fulbright-National Geographic Scholarship. Calzada primarily focuses on researching the interplay between human and ecological communities within tropical forests. His primary objective is to untangle the potential impacts of state-driven conservation and development interventions on this interaction.  When asked about how he was going to use the scholarship, Calzada said:  “I plan to use the grant to fund various aspects of my...

Congratulations to Professor Antonio Hernández Matos for completing a book review of Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America, by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Duke University Press, 2020. The review was published in European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies/Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 116 (2023): July-December. More Information: Here

       Congratulations to Professor Marcy Schwartz for receving the Clement A. Price Human Dignity Award. Named after the late and beloved Clement Price, a Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor, the award recognizes extraordinary contributions to diversity, inclusion, equity, and access at Rutgers. Professor Schwartz's chair of the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese and her area of research and teaching is Latin American literary and cultural studies from the twentieth century to the present...

CLAS is excited to share that this year we have established a partnership with the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies (RAICCS) to fund Caribbean-based projects.  The application process will be unitary, and RAICCS (and CLAS affiliate) professor Kathleen Lopez will be involved in the selection process. Deadline: February 1, 2024; Awardees will be notified around March 15. DOWNLOAD APPLICATION FORM Email the form to: Latin American Studies <latin-american-studies@lcs.rutgers.edu>;; 1.. The grants support the...

Special Collections and University Archives is delighted to present a new exhibit, Sacred Roots, Earthly Memories: Lydia Cabrera's Legacy, Diaspora and Community.  The exhibition is on display in Gallery '50 on the first floor of the Alexander Library until December 15, 2023.  Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991) was one of the 20th century's leading writers on Cuban folklore and an internationally known chronicler of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. Her papers, entrusted to the Cuban Heritage Collection,...

Interested in health communication, health inequities and interprofessional experiences? Then join one of the info sessions to learn more about our 4-week Summer 2024 Study Abroad program: Health communication & health inequities across the health professions in the U.S. and Puerto Rico! Building off the success of the past two years in Greece, Rutgers School of Communication & Information and Rutgers School of Health Professions are now taking this course to San Juan, Puerto Rico to explore topics...

Congratulations to Regina Marchi, professor of journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers, for receiving two awards at the International Latino Book Awards for her new book “Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon, Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition,”. Professor Marchi’s book is the recipient of awards in two categories, The Raul Yzaguirre Best Political/Current Affairs Book – English and The Dolores Huerta Best Cultural & Community Themed Book –...

Congratulations to Professor Janice Gallagher from the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark for publishing a new book titled Bootstrap Justice: The Search for Mexico's Disappeared. Professor Gallagher teaches classes on Latin American Politics, Social Movements, Human Rights, and classes in both the MA in Political Science Program and the Ph.D. in Global Urban Studies.     Bootstrap Justice centers the voices and perspectives of people whose lives have been upended by the...

Congratulations to Dr. Briana Nichols for publishing a new article titled: "Contesting Educational Imaginaries at the Intersection of Migration and Transnational Development in Guatemala" in the Anthropology & Education Quarterly for the American Anthropological Association.  First published on September 4, 2023, this article draws on 18 months of ethnographic engagement in Guatemala with Indigenous youth, local community organizations, and transnational nongovernmental organizations. It examines...

The 2024  Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies (MACLAS) conference, Hemispheric Horizons: Publics, Power, and Place in the Americas,  is set to take place on March 15-16. This year's conference aims to explore and discuss topics regarding how Latin American societies can draw on extant knowledge and past experiences to best meet challenges appearing on the horizon post the pandemic. While MACLAS encourages papers that engage with the conference themes, other submissions are welcome...