News and Announcements

Ph.D student in history, Laura De Moya-Guerra, is one of the two 2023-24 recipients of the Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative's Graduate Seed Grant Award. Her project is called "From a Plastic Bag to An Online Archive: The Community Archive of the Chinese in Barranquilla, Colombia," a digitized collection of records from a community archive at risk of loss and underrepresentation. She will present her work at next year's Digital Humanities Showcase.  Congratulations! 

Full-time LCS instructor, Antonio Hernández Matos, has published two pieces on masculinity and fashion in Puerto Rico. The first, “‘Hombres sí/Hombres nó:’ Fashioning Masculinity in Early Twentieth Century Puerto Rico” was featured in a special issue of Fashion Studies: State of the Field from the journal of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Fashion and Systemic Change. Click to read. Hernández Matos's second article is called “Dime cómo vistes y te diré quién eres: un acercamiento teórico...

May 19, 2023 Professor Camilla Townsend has published an introductory article to a special issue of Duke University Press's journal, Hispanic American Historical Review. Her article is called "At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America." "The people of San Germán, Puerto Rico, had gone to sleep for the night. It was 1581, and they had recently relocated their fledgling town inland in an effort to protect it from seaborne attack. But the Kalinagos who broke...

On May 25, 2023 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Working Group members including Professor Daniel da Silva will be participating in Queer Aqui Rio. Queer Aqui focuses on questions about the reliance of new right-wing populist regimes on homophobic, transphobic and misogynist ideologies. At the same time, they think about multiple forms of queer and trans life in Rio, and in the global south in general, which craft creative, powerful and impactful responses to these new forms of oppression. The...

Bridging Knowledges, Technologies, and Cultures in Latin America and the Caribbean New England Council of Latin American Studies Annual Meeting November 10-11, 2023Worcester Polytechnic InstituteWorcester, MA The New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) warmly invites you to our annual meeting at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, MA, on Friday, November 10 and Saturday, November 11, 2023. This year, the NECLAS conference seeks to explore the challenges and...

As we are approaching the end of the Spring Semester and the 2022-2023 academic year, CLAS would like to highlight some of our faculty's accomplishments, news, projects, and publications!   Kenneth Sebastian León has been awarded the Rutgers 2022-23 School of Arts and Sciences Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education. He has also written three articles, the first being  "Techno-Bureaucratic Race-Making: Latino (Mis)Representation in Criminology and Criminal Justice...

May 4, 2023 CLAS would like to acknowledge our students who are graduating with either a major or minor in Latin American Studies, Emili E. Darrow, Ana R. Principe, and Alexis Ramirez Espana! Congratulations graduates for all your hard work and we wish you all the best of luck in your future endeavors! 

May 2, 2023 CLAS is happy to announce that Ph.D. student Josh Anthony has been accepted to, and has won a grant to support his participation in, the summer 2023 workshop on "Missionary Manuscripts in Mesoamerican Languages." This two-week workshop, running from June 5-16, is cohosted by Princeton University Library, the Library of Congress, and Dumbarton Oaks, a research library and museum in DC with an extensive Mesoamerican collection. Josh will spend a week in Princeton before going down to...

Congratulations to Jennifer Markovtis Rojas who recently completed her dissertation defense for her Ph.D. in the Bilingualism and 2nd Language Acquisition program here at Rutgers. Her final dissertation is called "Heritage Aymara Bilingual in the North of Chile: Evidence of a Language Contact Situation to Enrich Intercultural Education." Abstract: Despite Spanish being the socially dominant language in many countries in South America, the indigenous language, Aymara, is widely spoken in...

Jian Ren, PhD candidate in History at Rutgers, has been awarded the History & Political Economy (HPE) Project Summer Research Grant. The HPE program supports awardees to undertake research in the summer of 2023 on topics related to their mission to understand how neoliberalism has been developed, implemented, and contested around the world. The History & Political Economy Project seeks to use the tools of historical inquiry to counter rising inequality, economic dislocation, and political...

CLAS and Rutgers have had many great additions over the past few years, one being Dr. Evelyn Saavedra Autry who is a 2020-2021 American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Race, Racism, and Inequality at the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Rutgers University. She 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...

April 9, 2023 WIPR, Sin Comillas, and Metro are a few online newspapers that have featured articles about the ongoing Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration. If you haven't heard yet, CLAS and director Aldo Lauria-Santiago are currently collaborating with sister institutions in Puerto Rico to help them preserve and make accessible important archival collections and periodical publications, in coordination with the research needs of a working group of faculty and graduate students who study Puerto Rico...

April 4, 2023 The 2023 CLAS conference was held on March 31st and was a great success! We had 17 presenters and most of them were graduate students, and we could have had even more!  It was great for faculty and students to reconnect after such a long period of Covid isolation and distance! Looking forward to doing something similar in the Fall! We'd like to send thanks to Daria and the work study students who helped with the setup and food, the admin support from Maria and Christina, our Grad...

April 4, 2023 CLAS is happy to announce this year's winners for the graduate student research and study awards! Congrats to the students!   Kiran Baldeo   Seeking to become proficient in the Spanish language. Leonardo Calzada    Local perspectives on the values, visions, and meanings of forest and their effect on the implementation of Sembrando Vida Rosa Emilia Cordero Cruz  Enslaved women of Puerto Rico's Arecibo District Laura Carolina De Moya-Guerra     Archival research in Archivo General de la Nación...

March 24, 2023 Lisette Varón-Carvajal, Ph.D. candidate in history, has been selected as one of eight Dissertation Fellows in Women’s Studies. Since 1974, the WW Women’s Studies Fellowship program has supported outstanding humanities and social science Ph.D. candidates whose work address women’s and gendered issues in interdisciplinary and original ways. Each Fellow receives a stipend to use towards research-related expenses such as travel, data work or collection, supplies, and others. Lisette...

March 24, 2023 Rutgers Professor Marcy Schwartz will be giving a talk at National University in Cordoba, Argentina on March 31st, 2023 called "Itinerarios y archivos: Lectura urbana y sus alrededores." Bio: Marcy Schwartz specializes in 20th-century Latin American literature and culture, with particular emphasis on urban studies, exile, photography, and public culture. Among many works, she has published "Invenciones urbanas: Ficción y ciudad latinoamericanas" and "Public Pages: Reading along...

March 24, 2023 Congratulations to Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Policy Development Andrea Restrepo-Mieth who recently published an article in the Planning Theory and Practice journal! Her article is based on her research in Medellín, Colombia and she examines how planners move from reflection to action in pursuit of institutional change. She introduces the concept of "simple junctures," which are key moments in time that constitute opportunities to institutionalize new practices. Click...

Peter Bjorndahl Sorensen has accepted a tenure track position at Hong Kong Baptist University. Peter is a 2022 graduate of the History Ph.D. program and worked with Professor Townsend. Peter is now is a Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wolf Humanities Center. Peter's work focuses on Nahuatl language documents, and popular song lyrics that engage the voices of the Nahuas during a time of upheaval and conflict. By contextualizing the song lyrics within...

Congratulations to Celso Mendoza for being selected for a position as Bridge-to-Faculty Postdoctoral Research Associate with the History Department of the University of Illinois, Chicago! Celso is ABD in the History Department's Latin American program. His dissertation committee is chaired by Prof. Camilla Townsend and includes Professor Lauria Santiago, Emeriti Professor Mark Wasserman and Professor Tatiana Seijas. The Post Doctoral position will transition to the tenure track within two...

March 17, 2023 CLAS is happy to announce our brand new YouTube channel! CLAS is devoted to promoting pedagogy, research, and service in and about the broader region known as Las Américas, and with the new  YouTube channel we will continue to generate new insights into Latin American culture and society, politics and economics, and environment and ecology. As of now, we are uploading past conferences, presentations, and talks featuring both Rutgers scholars and guest Latin American and Caribbean...

February 27, 2023 "Mexican government finalizing plans to open consulate in New Brunswick" Excerpted from The Daily Targum article, found here.  The Mexican Foreign Ministry recently announced the establishment of a new Mexican consulate in the city of New Brunswick, according to a press release. Mexican consulates provide vital services for passports, visas and other legal assistance but also deepen community outreach and bilateral relations, she said. The Mexican government outnumbers all...

February 20, 2023 CLAS Postdoctoral Fellow Briana Nichols publishes a piece called "Indigenous Education and COVID-19 in Guatemala" for Columbia University's Center for Mexico and Central America (CeMeCa)'s Regional Expert Series. The Regional Expert Papers Series aims to publish selected reports, papers, and data from research centers in Central America and Mexico that would otherwise not be available to an English language audience. They also invite researchers and academics based in the...

February 20, 2023 In the summer of 2022 I coordinated an internship for Rutgers and Yale graduate students at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico.  Students spent five weeks there and spent a portion of their time as volunteer interns working organizing archival collections while also carrying out research for their own projects. Last summer they helped organize a massive Fomento Industrial collection which is now available for researcher use.  The collections likely to be worked this summer...

February 17, 2023 On Friday, March 31, 10 pm-1 pm, CLAS Faculty and Graduate Students will participate in a research Conference. The event will include funded graduate students from the last two cycles of funding! Will be held at Lucy Stone Hall, rooms A255/256 Lunch to follow in room A268!

February 16, 2023 From March 1 until April 5, 2023, the Mentoring for Social Justice and Community-Building Project, a joint initiative of the School of Graduate Studies and Douglass Residential College, will host "Latin American Film Festival: Indigenous Voices."  In our current global situation of climate change and environmental catastrophe, many environmental humanities scholars are turning to indigenous ontologies to seek out answers and guidance. The five movies that we curated for the...

February 12, 2023 The growth in the Mexican origin and descent population in central Jersey surely warrants the presence of the new consulate.  Even the demographics of New Brunswick alone have changed and there is a large population that can take advantage of the services the consulate provides.  Besides the documentation services, the Mexican Consulate has also provided important support for the Mexican and Mexican American community.  Consuls don’t typically engage in state-to-state policy issues...

Rutgers Professor Camilla Townsend has published a piece in an unexpected place—a book about the movies! She discusses Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto (2006) in a new book edited by Donald Stevens, Latin American History at the Movies. More than thirty years ago, in 1989, when Stevens wasn’t long out of grad school, he published an anthology of essays on movies about Latin American history in a book entitled Based on a True Story. Towards the end of his career, he was struck by how much richer...

MACLAS Salisbury University's Proposal Deadline Extended to January 27, 2023 The 2023 MACLAS conference, The Afro-Americas: A Hemispheric Conversation (to be held March 10-11, 2023), aims to explore and discuss topics regarding what Black liberation has historically meant in the region as well as the response by dominant groups. While MACLAS encourages papers that engage with the conference themes, other submissions are welcome. MACLAS seeks scholarship from a wide array of disciplines,...

Sandy Rodriguez: To Translate the Unfathomable will be on view from January 17 – April 7, 2023, in the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Douglass Library. Rodriguez’s recent work consists of maps, botanical studies, and figural compositions painted in hand processed watercolors on amate paper with techniques, forms, and pigments of Mesoamerican manuscripts produced by the Mexica people and other Mexican natives in the first century after the Conquest of Mexico (1519-21). The...

The NAPA-OT Field School in Antigua, Guatemala is now recruiting anthropology, global public health, and students in related disciplines for its four-week summer session: June 5-30, 2023 The field school offers transdisciplinary learning to promote leadership in social justice through collaboration with Guatemala-based NGO and other community partners. Graduate students and upper division undergraduate majors in anthropology, occupational therapy, public health or related disciplines are...

Josh Anthony, a Ph.D. Student in the History Department who specializes in Latin American and Global and Comparative History, won a fellowship at the Hispanic Society of America in New York City, where he will be doing independent research on their Mexican collection as well as helping the curatorial and archival staff. After several years of being closed, the Hispanic Society is opening again to the public and the Rockefeller Brothers Curatorial Research Fellowship provides Josh the...

CLAS Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Briana Nichols will be teaching a new course this spring term on Mexican and Central American Migration themes. This seminar will track both the shifts and continuities in migration from Mexico and Central America.  Taking the U.S. framing of migration across the southern border as a “crisis” as our starting point, we will work to complicate this “crisis” framing, interrogating the political, economic and social conditions that have generated the emergence and...

The Center for Latin American Studies is pleased to announce its Student Grant Competition CLAS Student grants support the work of Rutgers students interested in research and training in Latin American Studies. Awards are competitive and based on need and the merit of the proposed project. No more than $1500 may be requested. Payment will likely be made through payroll if grant recipient is an employee. Please consider this when designing the budget. Non-employee awardees will be reimbursed...

There's a new 3-credit course being offered for the Spring 2023 semester. It will be taught by Professor Hernandez-Matos and will be held on Monday/Thursday from 10:20 - 11:40 am. See the flyer below for more information:   Questions? Write to Prof. Antonio Hernandez-Matos ah1434@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

El Instituto Tepoztlán para la Historia Transnacional is calling for participants for their 2023 conference in Tepoztlán, Morelos, México on July 19 - 26, 2023 DEADLINE TO APPLY: JANUARY 15, 2023 Systems of colonization, of exploitation, of citizenship, and of exclusivity produce responses that can be coded as fugitivity and marronage. Those practices of alterity and freedom seek to elude force and violence, but they also invite new forms of placemaking and inclusivity. Abolition – of...

For the Universidad de Puerto Rico en Arecibo's Centro de Estudios Iberoamericanos (CEI) CLAS Director, Professor Aldo Lauria Santiago, presented a talk called "Puerto Ricans in the Latino world of New York" in the decades from the 1920s to the 1960s. His talk emphasized the political militancy and trade union of Puerto Ricans in the Big Apple, where 55% belonged to a union and many were affiliated with socialist, communist, or progressive liberal movements or parties.     The event took place on...

PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology, Andrés González-Saiz, co-edits a book called "Crimen organizado transnacional y dimensiones culturales en América Latina" More about Andrés and his work: Are criminal activities influenced by cultural contexts? Are certain societies more prone to crime than others? Andrés M.F. Gonzalez-Saiz explores these and other relevant questions in the co-edited book “Crimen organizado transnacional y dimensiones culturales en América Latina” (“Transnational Organized...

The Rutgers Program in Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference: (de)composition Keynotes: Prof. Ana María Ochoa, Tulane University and Prof. Karen Redrobe, University of Pennsylvania March 3, 2023 Call for Papers: The dilemma of Comparative Literature to imagine a positive, cosmopolitan collective has invited reflections on alternate ways of forging connectivity, through closer attention to materiality, embodiment, and the precarity of human and non-human life. This leads us to...

The American Historical Association announced Rutgers University professor of history, Dr. Yesenia Barragan, as one of the winners of its 2022 prizes. She is to be awarded at the AHA’s 136th annual meeting, which will take place in Philadelphia from January 5–8, 2023. The AHA offers annual prizes honoring exceptional books, distinguished teaching and mentoring in the classroom, public history, and other historical projects. Since 1896, the Association has conferred over 1,000 awards. This year’s...

The LASA Film Festival is held in conjunction with the annual LASA Congresses and contributes to the creation of alternative circuits for the exhibition of film production from & about Latin America, building new audiences, and inspiring individuals and communities to engage as active citizens at a local, national & international level. Audiovisual proposals must be submitted between October 1 and November 30, 2022. About LASA The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the largest...

Former Rutgers Post-Doctoral Fellow Jessica Mack has joined Rowan University as an Assistant Professor of History.   Her work examines the construction of Mexico's national university (UNAM).  Her book analyzes this monumental campus building project and the politics of land surrounding it to shed light on the strategies of Mexico’s one-party rule and the politics of dissent that would soon challenge it. 

Prof. of History Emeritus Mark Wasserman has just published MODERN LATIN AMERICA SINCE 1800: EVERYDAY LIFE AND POLITICS. At 278 pages, it is the most succinct, thorough history of the region and its people. MODERN LATIN AMERICA includes special features: Latin America Lives, Slice of Life, How Historians Understand, and Nature’s Way. Priced at $34.95, it is less than half the cost of its competitors. eBook ISBN; 978-3-030-96185-5 Print ISBN; 978-3-030-96184-8 “Modern Latin America…Covering the sweep of...

The Rutgers Initiative for the Book is sponsoring a public lecture that might be of interest to you: "Mexico's Workers of Thought: Rethinking Press Freedom and Political Culture Through Printing" with Corinna Zeltsman and response from Marcy Schwartz (Profesor of Spanish, Rutgers). Corinna Zeltsman (Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University) is the author of the prizewinning Ink under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (University of California Press,...

The SAS Public Humanities Initiative & the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Art History Department Presents: "Conquering Self-Representation: The Rise of Amazonian Indigenous Contemporary Art" with Giuliana Borea, an Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at Newcastle University, and an Affiliated Lecturer of Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. This event will be held on Thursday, September 29, 2022, at 5:40...

The Global Caribbean: 54th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH) Call for Papers San Juan/Carolina, Puerto Rico, June 11-15, 2023 For the 54th Annual Conference, the overall theme will be “The Global Caribbean.” There are three ways to participate in the conference as the ACH invites paper, poster, and panel proposals on any aspects of the above theme, but especially those that reflect on how the region has historically influenced global affairs or on the ways that...

Caribbean Urbanism, Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies (LatCar) 01:595:305:01 Fall 2022 Dr. William KellyWednesdays – 2:00-5:00william.t.kelly@rutgers.com Course Description Whose voices are included when cities are built and run, and whose are excluded? Why? What does it mean to live in a city? What makes cities distinct from other sorts of spaces? In “Caribbean Urbanism,” we will explore these and other questions in the Caribbean context, from creation of the earliest European...

On September 23 and 24, 2022, Rutgers University will host an in-person conference entitled “1522: Exploring Indigenous Perspectives on the Post-conquest Years.” We live in an era when Indigenous scholars are coming into their own. Many young people are obtaining their doctorates and entering the scholarly conversation. Yet relatively few of them study the conquest and the very early colonial period (as opposed to the more modern period). Even those who study other periods have extraordinary...

Prof. Laura Lomas (Newark-American Studies) recently published "Afro-Latina Disidentification and Bridging: Lourdes Casal’s Critical Race Theory" in the journal Meridians.   The exiled Cuban poet, editor, and feminist Lourdes Casal breaks with social scientific convention and identifies in the first person with “Hispanic Blackness,” feminism, and Cuba in her essays about race and revolution. Her bridging of identity categories informs Casal’s self-definition as a “radicalized” social scientist...

CFP: Latin American & Caribbean Section (LACS), Southern Historical Association Meeting, Charlotte, NC. November 9-12, 2023. Deadline: October 30, 2022 The Latin American and Caribbean Section (LACS) of the Southern Historical Association welcomes individual paper and panel proposals for the SHA’s 89th Annual Meeting to be held at the Westin Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, November 9-12, 2023. LACS accepts papers and panels on all aspects of Latin American and Caribbean history,...