(For a complete, year-by-year listing of DRCLAS Visiting Scholars, click here)

2009-2010
Alan McPherson is ConocoPhillips Petroleum Chair of Latin American Studies and Associate Professor of International and Area Studies at Oklahoma University. Professor McPherson trained at the Université de Montréal, San Francisco State University, and received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He teaches courses in Latin American Studies and U.S. international relations and specializes in U.S.-Latin American relations. His referenced articles have appeared in The Americas, the Latin American Research Review, Diplomatic History, the Brown Journal of World Affairs, Diplomacy and Statecraft, and Gender and History. He joins DRCLAS as the Central American Visiting Scholar during the Spring 2010 semester to work on a project involving the occupation and resistance of the United States in Latin America between 1912-1934.

Rodolfo Pastor is a social historian, from Honduras, where he has been a member of the Liberal Party Central Committee, and Minister of Culture from 1984-1998  and again from 2006 until recently. He has also been Coordinator of the Social Cabinet of President M. Zelaya. Dr. Pastor received his BA from Tulane University and holds a Ph.D. in history from El Colegio de México where he has also been a research professor of history. Pastor has previously been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago and Haverford College. His research has focused on social history and ethnohistory. In addition to his nine books, he has been a regular columnist of newspapers in Honduras and contributed to United Nations publications on social policy. During his time at Harvard he will teach two courses in the Department of History: Central American and Mexican (or Mesoamerican) Peoples: 1500-1840, and Alternative Narratives: An Introductory Seminar on the Modern Literature and Historiography of Latin America.

Sergio Ramírez is a Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor in Latin American Studies for Fall 2009 in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.  Mr. Ramírez is the former vice-president of Nicaragua (1985-1990) and is a novelist and essayist whose work offers a powerful vision of culture, politics, and society.  His literary work has been translated into fifteen languages and has been awarded prestigious literary prizes.  Among these are the Premio Internacional Dashiell Hammett for his novel Castigo divino in 1988, the 1998 Laure Bataillon Prize for the best foreign language book in translation in France for his novel Un baile de mascaras (1995), and the Premio Internacional de Novela Alfaguara for his best known novel, Margarita, está linda la mar in 1998.  During the fall semester he will teach Historia pública y privada en la novela latinoamericana in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

2008-2009
Javier Corrales is an associate professor and chair of political science at Amherst College. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1996, specializing in the politics of economic and social policy reform in Latin America. Corrales is the author of Presidents Without Parties: the Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s. He has written extensively on the Chávez regime, and most recently, co-authored an article in the Journal of Democracy, entitled “Venezuela: Crowding Out the Opposition.” Corrales will be the Central America Visiting Scholar for Spring 2009 working on a project entitled Fixing Democracy: Power Asymmetries and Constituent Assemblies in Latin America Since the 1980s.

Martha Few will be a Visiting Scholar during the Spring 2009 semester. An Associate Professor of Latin American history at the University of Arizona, her research focuses on colonial Guatemala and Mexico, Mesoamerican ethnohistory, the history of medicine and healing, religion, and gender studies. She is the author of Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, which will be published in Spanish translation as Mujeres de mal vivir: Género, religión, y las políticas de poder en la Guatemala colonial. Recent journal articles and book chapters include "'That Monster of Nature': Gender, Sexuality, and the Medicalization of a 'Hermaphrodite' in Late Colonial Guatemala," in Ethnohistory; and "'Our Lord Entered His Body': Miraculous Healing and Children's Bodies in Colonial New Spain," in Religion in New Spain  Dr. Few’s current research will result in a book entitled, All of Humanity: Colonial Guatemala and New World Medical Cultures Before the Smallpox Vaccine.

2007-2008
Justin Wolfe is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Tulane University. His research and teaching focuses on Latin American post-colonial social and cultural history, with special emphasis on Central America. Current research includes nation-state formation, race and ethnicity, and the African Diaspora. In 2005 he was a Visiting Fulbright Professor, at the Universidad Centroamericano, Managua, Nicaragua. He has written The Everyday Nation-State: Community, Ethnicity and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). As the Central American Visiting Scholar during the Spring 2008 semester he will work on his next book, entitled Cosmopolitan Rabble: Race, Empire and Nation in Nicaragua, 1700-1900.

2006-2007
Hector Silva joins the Center as the Central American Visiting Fellow. Dr. Silva is a member of the Congress of El Salvador. He has served two terms as the Mayor of the Capital City of San Salvador during which he worked on the decentralization of government and the rehabilitation of downtown San Salvador . Dr. Silva will work on a project entitled Establishing Guidelines to Increase the Coverage of Health Insurance in the Population Receiving Remittances in Latin America: the Case of El Salvador. Dr. Silva holds degrees in obstetrics from the University of Michigan , Public Health from Johns Hopkins University , and social policy management from the Institute for Social Development in Washington , DC . He will be in residence for the full academic year.

2005-2006
James Iffland joined the Center as the Central American Visiting Scholar. During his stay, he conducted research on the life and works of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. His project was entitled Culture and Revolutionary Politics in El Salvador: The Case of Roque Dalton. Iffland is currently Professor of Literature at Boston University. He holds a Ph.D. from Brown University. He was in residence the full year.

2004-2005
Oscar Pelaez-Almengor joins the Center as the Central American Visiting Scholar from the Universidad de San Carlos of Guatemala for the 2004-2005 academic year. During his stay at Harvard, Pelaez-Almengor will conduct research on The Central American Entrepreneurial Elite through the intersection of economy and State from 1980 to 2003. Since the late 1980s, much of his research focused on the role of the economic elite in the process of state formation. His work breaks with traditional studies, which generally focus on external hegemonic forces as determinants of the region's economic foibles, and instead looks to internal factors to better explain the course of Central American economic history. Pel?°ez-Almengor has written extensively on Guatemala and holds a Ph.D. from Tulane University.