Tatiana Flores joins the Center for the Fall 2007 semester as a Cisneros Visiting Scholar. She is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University specializing in Latin American art, particularly modern and contemporary art. Her research has focused on the origins of avant-garde activity in Mexico, historiography and critical theory in art history, as well as the interrelationship between modern art movements in Europe, the United States, and the Americas. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Fulbright-García Robles fellowship through which she undertook research in Mexico. She is a regular contributor to Art Nexus the leading magazine on Latin American and Hispanic art. While at DRCLAS Dr. Flores will work on a manuscript entitled Art and Visual Culture Under Chávez.
Robert J. Gay is a Professor of Sociology at Connecticut College where he also serves as the Director of the Toor-Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts. Professor Gay’s research focuses on clientelism, democracy and civil society in Brazil and other countries of Latin America. With the support of an American Council of Learned Societies grant, he published Lucia: Testimonies of a Brazilian Drug Dealer’s Woman. Gay is also the author of Popular Organization & Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: A Tale of Two Favelas and has published numerous articles on Latin American political change. As the Lemann Visiting Scholar he will be in residence during the Spring 2008 semester working on his latest project Drugs, Corruption and Everyday Violence in Rio de Janeiro: A Soldier's Story.
Matías Irigoyen Testa will hold a concurrent appointment as a DRCLAS Visiting Scholar, and Fellow of the Real Colegio Complutense. He received his Ph. D. from the Department of Applied Economics at the Universdad Complutenese de Madrid and holds a masters degree in Financial Analysis from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He also holds a masters in Law, Economics and Public Policy from the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset de Madrid and a law degree from the Universidad de la Plata in Argentina. Currently he is a law professor at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina where he also chairs the department. He has previously been a Visiting Scholar at the European Law Research Center at Harvard University. Professor Irigoyen will research punitive damages in the U.S. legal system and hopes his work will help inform policy development in Argentina’s legal system.
Flavio Janches will be the de Fortabat Visiting Fellow. He holds a degree in architecture from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, at the University of Buenos Aires, where he is currently a professor. He is a partner at the firm Arquitectos: Blinder Janches & co. where his work has been recognized with several national and international awards. During his fellowship he will co-teach a class with Professor John Beardsley at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and will work on his project The Significance of Public Space in Marginal Areas
Antonio Martorell will be the Center’s Wilbur Marvin Fellow during the Spring semester. He is well known as a painter, book designer, set designer, and installation artist. His work has been exhibited at Puerto Rico’s Institute of Culture, the Ponce Art Museum as well as the National Gallery of San Salvador, El Museo de Arte Moderno de México, and the Whitney Museum. Currently he is the Resident Artist at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey, where he also directs the Museum Ramon Frade. Martorell has written books such as La Piel de la Memoria (The Skin of Memory), and El Libro Dibujado (The Drawn Book) and currently writes a monthly column for the cultural supplement of the Puerto Rican newspaper, El Vocero. During his fellowship Martorell will work on an autobiographical book entitled, “Dancing with Cinderella: A Life in Art.”
Fermín José Rada is a full professor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Ecology Universidad de Los Andes where he also received his doctoral degree in Tropical Ecology. He has published extensively in numerous journals including Agrociencia, Scientia Horticulturae and the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture. He will be a Cisneros Visiting Scholar during the Spring 2008 semester when he will work on his project entitled Plant Water Relations: Stem and Leaf Water Hydrolics.
Jesús Velasco is a former Fellow of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He joins DRCLAS as a Madero/Fundación México Visiting Scholar for the 2007 – 2008 academic year. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science, from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently an Associate Professor, at the Center for Teaching and Research in Economics, (CIDE) in Mexico City. Professor Velasco has been a Public Policy Scholar, at the Woodrow Wilson Center; and his research areas include: American Political Development and US-Mexican Relations. Dr. Velasco is co-editor of Bridging the Border: Transforming Mexico-US Relations; and the editor of Behind the Crown: The Influence of Neo-conservatism on American Foreign Policy. During his fellowship he will be working on his next book, Seducing America: The Relationship Between the Mexican Government and American Transnational Intellectuals, 1920s – 2006.
Victor Vich received
his Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literature from Georgetown
University. He is currently an associate professor at Pontificia
Universidad Católica del Perú. He has published three books: El
discurso de la calle: los cómicos ambulantes y las tensiones de la
modernidad en el Perú, El caníbal es el otro. Violencia y cultura en el
Perú contemporáneo, and Oralidad y poder (with Virginia Zavala), and
numerous articles. As the Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar during the
Fall 2007 semester, he will be working on a project entitled, War
Texts: Literature and Political Violence in Peru. He will also teach
Spanish 187, “Representations of Violence in Peru” in the Department of
Romance Languages and Literatures.
Gratzia Villarroel will be a Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar during the 2007- 2008 academic year. Currently she is an Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of International Studies at St. Norbert College De Pere, Wisconsin. Dr. Villarroel’s scholarship focuses on the interplay of gender, class and race and the impact that these variables have on the political participation of women in Latin America. Her publications include Bolivia: Women's Rights, the International Women's Convention, and State Compliance in Women's Rights: A Global View and Women, Adamocracy and the Bolivian Social Revolution in Women and Revolution in the Third World. While at Harvard she will work on her manuscript entitled, In the Footsteps of Bartolina Sisa: Bolivian Indigenous Women, Evo Morales and the Bolivian Indigenous Revolution.
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.