Center for Latin American Studies

People

Graduate Student Affiliate

Alan Palacios

  • Alan Palacios
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Comparative Literature
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): decolonial studies, Indigenous & Native American languages/literatures/philosophies, Quechua/Quichua & Mapuche theories and poetry, theories of poetry, praxes of resistance against multiple forms of oppression: race/sexuality/gender/class, Chicana/x & Latina/x & Women of Color Feminisms and theories, literatures & theories of the Global South.
  • Degree: MA in Comparative Literature (SUNY Binghamton)

Alana Rader

Alex Liebman

  • Alex Liebman
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Geography
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): agrarian studies, Black geographies, digitalization, science and technology studies, Colombia
  • Dissertation Title: Programmed Landcapes: The Production of Digital Nature in the Valle del Cauca
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: I contextualize the ubiquity of digital development discourses and initiatives in the Valle del Cauca, demonstrating how efforts to resolve the “digital divide” are themselves shaped by regional land and labor conflicts that reflect longstanding race and class antagonisms. Through an institutional ethnography of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, I use situated research examining the center’s work amidst agrarian transformations in the Valley. I engage in theoretical debates in science and technology studies, political ecology, and related interdisciplinary fields questioning the impact of digital processes on nature, labor, and subjectivity. Technology is embedded within thick webs of history, social networks, and political processes, reflecting these linkages while also belying them. I complicate the depiction of digitalization as a unidirectional application of the “smart” digital to “backwards”, analog-processes of rural farming. Through questioning the Valley’s history as a site of international development, an agro-technological frontier, and a space of extreme violence and inequality, I question the normative claims surrounding agricultural digitalization as a solution for socio-ecological crises. The multivalent process of agricultural digitalization requires attention to the politics of how and where scale is created and the frictions that emerge as the universalizing ideals of technological grandeur are interrupted and impacted by situated contexts.
  • Bio: I explore how (agricultural) data science reproduces particular forms of standardization and homogeneity that constitute racialized and exclusionary forms of international development and environmental management across the global South. I approach questions of the "digital" and the "ecological" from a range of heterodox traditions including Marxist thought, Black studies, and feminist science and technology studies. I have a BA in biology from Macalester College and an MSc in agroecology/soil science from the Universty of Minnesota.
  • Publications: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander-Liebman-2

Anabelle Rodriguez

Andres Gonzalez-Saiz

Ariela Parisi

  • Ariela Parisi
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Spanish and Portuguese
  • Project: Between Forgetting and Foreseeing: Paths of Memory in Latin American Speculative Fiction
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): 20th-21st century speculative fiction - Human Rights- Memory Studies - Dictatorships and Postmemory - Future Studies - Afrofuturism
  • Dissertation Title: Between Forgetting and Foreseeing: Paths of Memory in Latin American Speculative Fiction
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: This transregional project aims to unite two tangents: contemporary Latin American speculative arts (2000-2022) and the cultural memory of recent dictatorial pasts — including the legacies and consequences of their neoliberal policies — in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil. , Colombia and Guatemala. Defining the term "speculative arts" in relation to Latin American cultural memory represents an aporetic challenge that this work aims to overcome.
  • Bio: Ariela Parisi is a PhD candidate at the Spanish and Portuguese department at Rutgers University. Her research interests include Latin American speculative fiction with a focus on the representation of violence and social trauma in contemporary works of Science Fiction and Horror from the Southern Cone and Brazil. Prior to joining Rutgers University in 2019, Parisi received her MA in Spanish at Ohio University.

Caleb Delorme

Camila Bellird

  • Camila Bellird
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Women Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • Project: Racialized and gendered violence in the Dominican Republic: Black women?s embodied archives of resilience and resistance in everyday life.
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Caribbean Diasporas and Migration; Black Caribbean Studies; Blackness and Racism; Structural violence; Black Feminisms, Racialization and embodiment, Resilience and Self-Making, Spirituality and mental Health, Decolonial and Feminist Research Methodologies.
  • Bio: Camila María Belliard is a Dominican and Chilean Social Anthropologist and a feminist, antiracist and decolonial researcher. Her main professional and personal experience has been focused in gender, race, and migration studies in the south America and the Caribbean. In 2013 she joined the team of an important research project around anti-black racism in Chile, where she researched the intersections of gender, sexuality and race in the experience of black Caribbean migrants. Her work substantively contributed to the study of processes of racialization between Chileans and the AfroCaribbean migrant community, with a special focus on sexual commerce sphere and afro-Caribbean identities.In the Dominican Republic, her work was mainly on gender and education development through consultancy work at INTEC and UNIBE, Universities, she also worked as an instructor for undergraduate introduction courses on gender and migration. Presently, in addition to her dissertation work, she continues to collaborate as an associated researcher and scholar at OBMICA (Migration in the Caribbean Observatory) and the CEG-INTEC Preferred Pronouns: She, her, hers

Clio Bravo Idrobo

  • Clio Bravo Idrobo
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: MFA
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: Art and Design
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Latinx identity, decolonization, indigeneity, mestizaje, and contemporary art.

Daniel Friedman

  • Daniel Friedman
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: Ms
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Geography

Daniela Mosquera Camacho

David Roldán Eugenio

  • David Roldán Eugenio
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Spanish and Portuguese
  • Project: Transatlatic cultural relations between Spain and Cuba prior the Cuban Revolution
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): 19th-20th century Spain and Cuba, Visual Culture, Performance and Corporeality, Flamenco and nacional-flamenquismo during Franco's dictatorship in Spain (1939-75)
  • Dissertation Title: Gypsified Minorities on the Atlantic Stage: Visualizing and Performing Alternative Identities in Spain and Cuba (1900-1959)
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: This transatlantic study shows how “Gypsification” enabled queer, non-white, and (neo)colonized minorities in pre-revolutionary Cuba to shape novel conceptualizations of collective identity and sociocultural solidarity.

Diana Iturralde Mantilla

  • Diana Iturralde Mantilla
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Art History
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Early modern art of the Americas

Elvis Fuentes

  • Elvis Fuentes
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Art History
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Cuba, Puerto Rico, Caribbean, Latinx, Cold War in Latin American & Caribbean Art
  • Dissertation Title: Bowling for Moscow: Afterlife of Soviet Visual Culture in Cuban Art
  • Bio: Elvis Fuentes is PhD Candidate in Art History at Rutgers University. He served as curator at El Museo del Barrio New York (2006-2013), where he directed and co-curated, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, 2012. In 2005, he won the Grand Prix at the 26th International Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Eslovenia, with the curatorial project, Print As Metaphor. Fuentes is Adjunct Lecturer at City College of New York, Lehman College, and the University of Hartford, where he teaches courses on Caribbean art, Latin American art, and Postwar Art. He is currently a Dodge Lawrence Curatorial Fellow at the Zimmerli Museum of Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Fuentes writes regularly for ArtNexus magazine, and is an nominating advisor at CIFO and Prix Pictect.

Emma Oslé

  • Emma Oslé
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Art History
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Latinx/e Artists, Motherhood/Mothering, Race, Environmental Humanities, borderlands, critical Latinx/e indigeneities
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: I am looking at contemporary U.S. Latinx and indigenous visual production, with special interests in Motherhood, race, and the environmental humanities. I am hoping to center my larger project on depictions of motherhood, particularly motherhood at border sites and mothering in treacherous conditions, such as race-based violence, ecological disaster/spillage, and indigenous migration.
  • Bio: Emma Oslé (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her current work focuses on contemporary U.S. Latinx and indigenous visual production, with special interests in race, graphic art, eco-art history, and the environmental humanities. She has worked in several museums throughout the United States including MoMA (NYC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and multiple smaller institutions and private collections. In addition to her work in Art History, Emma holds BFA’s in both Sculpture and Printmaking from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, and has shown work throughout the Philadelphia region.

Esperanza Santos

  • Esperanza Santos
  • Campus: Newark
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: American Studies

Federica Soddu

Graduate Student Affiliates

  • Graduate Student Affiliates
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: American Studies

Will be added shortly.

Henry Maquera

  • Henry Maquera
  • Campus: Newark
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: Division of Global Affairs
  • Project: Indigenous communities in Peru

Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo

  • Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: English
  • Dissertation Title: Maroon Entanglements: Women's and Femmes' Erotic Strategies in Caribbean Narrative
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: My dissertation analyzes representations of self-emancipated slaves in contemporary Caribbean narrative as sites where queer sexuality is practiced despite and through compromised agency.
  • Bio: Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She completed a Master's degree in the English Department at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program of Literatures in English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her dissertation explores how women and femmes in contemporary Caribbean literature practice marronage as an erotic strategy. She is a principal collaborator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus, a digital resource to understand Puerto Rico’s economic crisis and she is an editor for the Puerto Rico Review.
  • Publications: “Puerto Rico's Feminist & Queer Maroon Rebellions Have a Soundtrack: It's Plena.” Escribe, Mi Gente Journal, forthcoming January 2022.

Jamie Gagliano

Javier González Cortés

  • Javier González Cortés
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: History
  • Project: Animal collecting in natural history (18th century)
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): History of Science, Animal History, Scientific Collecting, Colombia, Latin America
  • Bio: Javier is a Ph.D student in History interested in understanding the relationships between humans and nonhuman animals in Colombia and other parts of Latin America. He is particularly interested in the history of science done in the 18th century. Javier holds a master’s degree in bioethics and his undergraduate studies were in biology. Before joining the Ph.D program in History at Rutgers, he worked as an assistant professor at the Institute of Bioethics of the Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia, where he taught courses on environmental and animal ethics.

Javiera Barrientos

Jeffrey Aizprua

  • Jeffrey Aizprua
  • Campus: Newark
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: Division of Global Affairs
  • Project: Ecuador and the Andean countries; Guarantee Rights; Development Rights vs Environmental Rights; Economic growth"

Jennifer Markovits

  • Jennifer Markovits
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Spanish and Portuguese
  • Project: Intercultural curriculum-Bolivia-Chile
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Heritage language, Dominant language as a second language, Chile, Bolivia
  • Dissertation Title: "Cross-linguistic influence between Aymara and Spanish: How Interculturalism Can Miss the Language of Heritage Speakers."
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: This project examines cross-linguistic influence in heritage speakers in Chilean -Bolivian border to develop a intercultural curriculum to strengthen the identity of the transnational Aymara nation.
  • Bio: Jennifer Markovits Rojas is a Spanish assistant professor at Universidad de Playa Ancha, a state university in Chile since 2014. She is a Spanish teacher from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, and she received her master's degree in Linguistics and Chilean Dialectology from Universidad de Playa Ancha, Valparaiso. Jennifer has worked teaching morphosyntax, Chilean phonetics, and Spanish as the second language at the same university. In 2018 she got a Fulbright fellowship to pursue doctoral studies in the United States. Now she is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition program at Rutgers University. She is currently working with Aymara heritage speaker in Chile, designing projects to develop an intercultural curriculum. She also leads a project to teach Spanish as a second language to adult Haitian in the region of Valparaiso, Chile.

Jennifer Natoli

  • Jennifer Natoli
  • Campus: Newark
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: Division of Global Affairs
  • Project: Social production of disaster in Puerto Rico

José Torres

  • José Torres
  • Campus: Newark
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: Division of Global Affairs
  • Project: COVID-19 impact in Peru

Josh Anthony

  • Josh Anthony
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: History
  • Project: History of the Nahua family and gender in the 16th and 17th centuries
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Ethnohistory; Indigenous History; Gender; Imperialism/Colonialism; New Spain/Mexico

Joyce Lu

  • Joyce Lu
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Anthropology
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): therapeutic economy, healing, microbes, pharmaceuticals, body politics, Guatemala

Katia Yoza

  • Katia Yoza
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Spanish and Portuguese
  • Project: Contemporary urban and global transmissions of traditional narratives on Amazonian cosmovisions and collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Amazonian Literature, Art and Culture, Latin American Indigenous Literature and Culture, Latin American Contemporary Public and Visual Culture, Environmental Humanities, Political Ecologies, Indigenous Studies, Public Humanities, Gender in Latin American Cinema
  • Dissertation Title: Resilience and Indigenous Cosmovisions: Humans and Nonhumans in Visual and Written Narratives from the Peruvian Amazon
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: Indigenous peoples from the Peruvian Amazon are innovating how they communicate traditional narratives for building their social-ecological resilience and their alliances with global actors.

Leonardo Calzada

  • Leonardo Calzada
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Geography
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): land system science, land-use change, political ecology, tropical forest, Mexico
  • Dissertation Title: The kaleidoscope of the Maya Forest – agricultural change, forest governance and vegetation dynamics in communities of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico
  • Abstract of Dissertation Work: The current Mexican government has proposed a regional development plan in the Selva Maya that promotes multifunctional landscapes to address forest loss, climate change, and poverty alleviation through new forest governance arrangements. This development plan is composed of two synergistic projects, the first is the construction of the Mayan Touristic Train of 948 miles in length. The second is a public policy called Sembrando Vida, the most extensive reforestation program in the history of Mexico with a projection of 2 million hectares planted with timber and fruit trees. My research will focus on current frontier formations in the Maya Forest in Mexico as a case to expand on the recognition of how agrarian communities and forests relate and are co-constitutive. To do so, I will first characterize peasants' perspectives of the internal functioning of the ejido (agrarian communities under common management) and the values they assign to forests and Land. Second, I will analyze forest degradation using satellite images and pattern-based statistical models to generate future scenarios of forest degradation to 2025 and 2030. Finally, I will integrate peasants ' perspectives into the degradation analysis by discussing how these scenarios contrast with peasant imaginaries about future environmental and social change, producing what I have called "the kaleidoscope of the Maya Forest."
  • Bio: Leonardo Calzada holds a B.A. and M.S. degree in Biological Sciences from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico). He served as Deputy Director of Biosafety Communication at the National Council of Science and Technology in Mexico. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Geography at Rutgers University, where his dissertation focuses on understanding the impact of development frontier formation on agrarian transformation and landscape dynamics in tropical forests. His areas of interest include Land System Science, Political Ecology, and Data Science.
  • Publications: Google Scholar

Lorena Avila Jaimes

  • Lorena Avila Jaimes
  • Campus: Newark
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : MGSA
  • Department: School of Criminal Justice
  • Project: Focuses on the intersections of civil and criminal law
  • Research Areas (themes, countries): Colombia, Mexico, Latin America

 

 

Lorena Avila Jaimes's academic interests focus on the intersections of civil and criminal law (specifically diasporas and immigration issues), courts and legal pluralism, and inequality.

Some of Lorena Avila Jaimes's focus has been on internal migration, forced displacement, in Colombia, and international migration in war contexts and economic precarity contexts. Currently, Lorena is more focused on the latter, capturing the presence of the south in the north, and analyzing the intersections of criminal law and immigration law to socially control specifically Central Americans and Mexicans, and Latin Americans overall.

Lorena has also previously done work on legal pluralism and human rights advocacy. More broadly, supporting scenarios where human rights protection mechanisms and indigenous traditions are knowledgeable for populations around the Latin American region, sometimes in its contradictions, but also in its intersections.

Maria Garcia

Martin Pardo

Michael Van Stine

Natascia Cappa

Raul Rodriguez Arancibia

  • Raul Rodriguez Arancibia
  • Campus: NB
  • PhD or MA: PhD
  • School : SAS
  • Department: Anthropology

Salvador Ayala Camarillo

Tamara Velasquez Leiferman

Thayane Brêtas

Vania Villanueva

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