Affiliated Faculty

More than 50 faculty members, lecturers, and postdocs from throughout the University devote considerable time to teaching and/or research related to Latin America. Our affiliates offer a full range of disciplinary and regional coverage of Latin America with areas of remarkable depth. To learn more, please explore the list below.

Michael Albertus, Department of Political Science
Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela
Political conditions under which governments implement egalitarian reforms; political regime transitions and stability; politics under dictatorship; clientelism; civil conflict

Fernando Alvarez, Department of Economics
Argentina
Dynamic general equilibrium models applied to asset pricing, search and insurance

Jessica Swanston Baker, Department of Music
Caribbean
Contemporary popular music of and in the Circum-Caribbean; tempo and aesthetics; coloniality, decolonization; race/gender and respectability

Maria Angélica Bautista, Harris School of Public Policy
Chile
Political, economic, and social consequences of state-led repression

N. Tulio Bermúdez, Department of Linguistics
Latin America, Caribbean
Documentation and description of grammatical, historical, and typological aspects of indigenous languages of Latin America and the Caribbean, esp. Naso (Chibchan, Panama); verbal art (linguistic forms that are interpreted as salient, e.g., ideophones, puns, poetic couplets); multilingual expressions and experiences of Latinx and queer identities

Christopher Blattman, Harris School of Public Policy
Colombia, Africa
Poverty, political engagement, the causes and consequences of violence, and policy in developing countries

Dain Borges, Department of History
Brazil, Caribbean
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American culture and ideas; intellectual history; history of the family

Neil Brenner, Department of Sociology
Latin America (collaborations with colleagues in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)
Cities and urbanization within the social sciences; environmental humanities; design disciplines and environmental studies; theoretical, conceptual, and methodological dimensions of urban questions; challenges of reinventing our approach to urbanization in relation to the crises, contradictions, and struggles of our time

Larissa Brewer-García, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Caribbean, Andes
Colonial Latin American studies; cultural productions of the Caribbean and Andes and the African diaspora in the Iberian empire; relationship between literature and law; genealogies of race and racism; humanism and Catholicism in the early modern Atlantic; translation studies

Claudia Brittenham, Department of Art History
Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras
Art and identity in ancient Mesoamerica; intercultural interaction; materiality of art; the politics of style

Chad Broughton, Social Sciences Collegiate Division
Mexico, US
Labor studies and trade and immigration policy; crime, justice and policing, and desistance from crime, with a particular interest in Chicago

Leonardo Bursztyn, Department of Economics
Brazil
Role of social pressure and social norms in shaping important economic decisions; educational, labor market, financial, consumption, and political decisions in developing and developed countries

Shannon Dawdy, Department of Anthropology
Cuba, Mexico
How landscapes and material objects mediate human relationships and how shared cultural experiences affect our perceptions of time (past, present, future); death, disaster, sensuality, and histories of colonialism and capitalism; pirates

Frederick De Armas, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Spain, Cuba
Literature of the Spanish Golden Age (Cervantes, Calderón, Claramonte, Lope de Vega), from a comparative perspective; has published two novels about Cuba, set before Castro and in 1960

Sergio Delgado Moya, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Latin America, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies
Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures during 20th and 21st centuries, art history of the Americas, consumer culture, media studies, migration, border studies, the literature and art of Greater Mexico, Brazilian literature and art, Chilean contemporary art and literature, experimental poetry, critical theory, conceptual art in Latin America, violence and sensationalism.

Oeindrila Dube, Harris School of Public Policy
Latin America, Africa
Political economy of development; links between poverty and conflict; how institutions affect health service delivery and the spread of epidemics; how economic shocks affect violent conflict; whether the gender identity of leaders determines their tendency to engage in war

Brodwyn Fischer, Department of History
Brazil, Latin America
Inequality and its persistence; informality, cities, citizenship, law, migration, race, slavery

René D. Flores, Department of Sociology
US, Latin America
International migration, race and ethnicity, social stratification; social consequences of subnational restrictionist immigration policies in the US; determinants of perceived immigrant illegality; effect of non-ethnic factors on ethnoracial identity in Latin America; adaptation of Latino and Asian immigrants in the US using social media data

Chiara Galli, Department of Comparative Human Development
US, Mexico
International migration, refugee studies, childhood, the life-course, law and policy

Rachel Galvin, Department of English
US, Latin America
Twentieth and twenty-first-century poetry and poetics in English, Spanish, and French; comparative modernisms; hemispheric studies; US Latinx literature; wartime literature; multilingual poetics; the Oulipo; translation theory and practic

Angela S. García, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, And Practice
US, Spain
International migration; law and society; race and ethnicity; urban sociology; social policy; consequences of socio-legal inclusion and exclusion for undocumented immigrants across the United States, Mexico, and Spain

Edgar Garcia, Department of English
The Americas
Hemispheric literatures and cultures of the Americas, principally of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; indigenous, Latinx, and Chicanx studies; American poetics; environmental criticism; theory of law; intersection of poetry and anthropology

Susan Gzesh, Social Sciences Collegiate Division
Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador
Inter-relationship between human rights and migration policy; the domestic application of international human rights norms; Mexico-US relations

James Heckman, Department of Economics
Chile, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Brazil
Inequality; social mobility; discrimination; skill formation and regulation

Mary Hicks, Department of History
Brazil, Black Atlantic
Slavery and Emancipation; the Atlantic world; early modern capitalism; colonialism, race, gender, and sexuality

Dwight N. Hopkins, Divinity School
Cuba
Contemporary models of theology; various forms of liberation theologies (especially black and other third-world manifestations); multidisciplinary approaches to the study of religious thought, especially cultural, political, economic, and interpretive

Ryan Cecil Jobson, Department of Anthropology
Caribbean
Energy and extractive resource development; technology and infrastructure; states and sovereignty; histories of racial capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial Americas; relationship between modern energy regimes (e.g., plantation slavery, carbon-based fuels) and the modern political ideal of sovereignty

Rashauna Johnson, Department of History
Atlantic World
Atlantic slavery and emancipation; nineteenth-century African diaspora; US South; urban and regional history; race, gender, and sexuality

Robert Kendrick, Department of Music
Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua
Latin American music; historical anthropology; visual arts

Alan L. Kolata, Department of Anthropology
Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala
Agroecological systems; human-environment interactions; the human dimension of global change; agricultural and rural development; archaeology and ethnohistory, particularly in the Andean region

Emilio Kourí, Department of History
Mexico
Modern Mexico; agrarian studies; social and economic history of Latin America; the history of ideas; Cuba and the Spanish Caribbean; US Latino/a history

Benjamin Lessing, Department of Political Science
Mexico, Colombia, Brazil
"Criminal conflict" (organized armed violence involving non-state actors who are not trying to topple the state); prison gangs' effect on state authority; how paramilitary groups use territorial control to influence electoral outcomes

Ana Maria Lima, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Brazil
Portuguese language; language pedagogy; Brazilian culture

Victor Lima, Department of Economics
Chile
Monetary economics; social effects; unemployment effects of labor regulation

Nené Lozada, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Peru, Mexico
Spanish language; South American bio-archaeology; human osteology

John Lucy, Department of Comparative Human Development
Mesoamerican Culture and Languages
Linguistic anthropology, Psychological anthropology, Mesoamerican culture and language forms; Social science theory and method

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Caribbean, Latin America
Nineteenth-century Latin American literature; nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean cultural history; relationships between cultural production and the formation of modern socio-political identities

Deirdre Lyons, Department of History
French Caribbean
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean history; French colonialism and empire; Atlantic worlds; history of slavery and emancipation in the Americas; post-abolition citizenship; cultural and social history; history of the family, gender, and sexuality

Juan Diego Mariategui, Romance Languages and Literatures
Hispanic Caribbean, Puerto Rico and Cuba
Relationship between literary representation, politics, and space; theoretical connections between ecocriticism, critical disaster studies, and biopolitics; and the links between the Hispanic Caribbean and Latin America

Luis Martinez, Harris School of Public Policy
Colombia
Political economy of development, particularly the relationship between taxation, accountability, and governance

Miguel Martínez, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Latin America
Cultural and literary histories of early modern Iberia and colonial Latin America; the ways in which early modern historical processes such as the printing and military revolutions, or the first globalization, contributed to a partial democratization of literary practices

Amy Leia Mclachlan, Global Studies
Colombia
Politics of plant life in the Colombian Amazon; extractive botanical economies (rubber, cocaine, pharmaceuticals); ethnobotany and curing in the Uitoto diaspora; displacement, world-making, trauma, gender

Alicia Menendez, Harris School of Public Policy
Argentina, Latin America
Development economics; education and health; labor markets; household behavior

Eduardo Montero, Harris School of Public Policy
Central America
How institutions and culture affect development and development policy in Central America and Central Africa; development economics, political economy, economic history, and the intersections between these interrelated topics

Salikoko Mufwene, Department of Linguistics
Caribbean, Atlantic World
Evolutionary linguistics (including the emergence of Creoles, the indigenization of European colonial languages, language vitality); Bantu linguistics; language contact in Africa and the Caribbean

Sarah Newman, Department of Anthropology
Mesoamerica
Archaeology and ethnohistory; waste, refuse, and reuse; zooarchaeology; human-animal relationships; landscape archaeology; human-environment interactions

Stephan Palmié, Department of Anthropology
Cuba
Ethnography and history of Afro-Caribbean cultures, with an emphasis on Afro-Cuban religious formations; practices of historical representation and knowledge production; systems of slavery and unfree labor; constructions of race and ethnicity; conceptions of embodiment and moral personhood; medical anthropology; anthropology of food and cuisine

Kaneesha Parsard, Department of English
Caribbean (British West Indies)
Legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Americas, and particularly concerns how gender and sexuality structure race, labor, and capital; Black feminisms, transnational feminisms, and materialist feminisms; Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, African American, and feminist and queer visual cultures; archives; property and inheritance; and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds

Mercedes Pascual, Department of Ecology and Evolution
Latin America
Theoretical ecology; infectious disease dynamics; ecological networks; spatio-temporal dynamics of infectious diseases in large cities of the developing world

Pablo Peña, Department of Economics
Mexico
Empirical economics and human capital theory; use of large data sets to test economic theories of behavior

François G. Richard , Department of Anthropology
Mexico, West Africa, France
Material histories of French colonialism and imperialism; French colonial presence in Mexico and its legacies in the present

James Robinson, Harris School of Public Policy
Haiti, Colombia, Latin America
Political and economic development; root causes of conflict; relationship between poverty and the institutions of a society; how institutions emerge out of political conflicts

Danielle Roper, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Peru, Colombia, Jamaica
Contemporary racial and queer performance, racial formation, feminist activism, and visual culture in the Hemispheric Americas

Mario Santana, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Latin America
Twentieth-century Latin American literature, narrative, and film; literary historiography; literary theory (hermeneutics and reception, narratology, systemic and institutional approaches to literature); cultural studies

Victoria Saramago, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures 
Brazil, Latin America
Twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin American literature, with a focus on Brazil; ecocriticism and fiction theory; theoretical approaches to the representation of forest and rural areas in Latin American fiction

Diana Schwartz Francisco, Center for Latin American Studies/Department of History
Mexico, Latin America
Indigenous politics; the nexus between economic development and environmental change in Latin America; the history and politics of social science; race in the Americas

Paul Sereno, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
Argentina, Mexico, Chile
Paeleontology; evolution; fossil record in Argentina

Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, Department of Cinema and Media Studies
Latin America
Latin American cinema and media; nonfiction cinema and media; Third Cinema; cinema and labor; race and representation; useful cinema

Susan Stokes, Department of Political Science
Latin America
Democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies; distributive politics; comparative political behavior

Megan Sullivan, Department of Art History
Brazil, Argentina
Modern and contemporary Latin American art; abstraction; modernism in a global context; the relationship of aesthetic modernism and social and economic modernization outside of the North Atlantic; artistic and intellectual exchanges between Latin America and other regions over course of the twentieth century

Christopher Taylor, Department of English
Americas, British West Indies
Hemispheric Americas in the nineteenth century; how the British West Indies were linked to worlds beyond the boundaries of the British Empire

Mauricio Tenorio, Department of History
Mexico
Political and cultural histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Kris Trujillo, Department of Comparative Literature
US
Christian mystical tradition; modern citations of the medieval; Latinx literature; queer of color critique

Gerdine Ulysse, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Haiti
French and Haitian Creole language; language variation and language attitudes and factors influencing multilingualism and literacy development in Creolophone communities

Austin L. Wright, Harris School of Public Policy
Colombia
Political economy of conflict and crime in Afghanistan, Colombia, Indonesia, and Iraq

Alan Zarychta, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, And Practice
Central and South America
Politics of social services; public health and environmental policy; sources and effects of institutional reforms aiming to improve local service delivery

Sj Zhang, Department of English
Caribbean
Seventeenth- through nineteenth-century archives of slavery and marronage in the United States and Caribbean; how resistance practices and flight from enslavement by Black and Native individuals in the Caribbean and North America shaped textual and visual production in the colonial period; constructions of gender, race, and forms of bondage before 1850

Erik Zyman, Department of Linguistics
Mexico
Theoretical syntactician, research languages have included P'urhepecha and Teotitlán del Valle Zapotec