Each year, CLAS hosts academic visitors—who teach, conduct research, meet with faculty and students, and engage in the intellectual life of the community—from institutions across the US and the world.
Visiting Professors are hosted through the Tinker Visiting Professorship and through the Center's institutional relationships, and teach courses in addition to conducting research.
Visiting Scholars conduct short-term research in our libraries, often in collaboration with University faculty.
Associate Members are scholars based at institutions other than the University of Chicago who reside in the Chicago area or are in Chicago frequently and can participate in CLAS activities.
Nominations for Visiting Professors, Visiting Scholars, and Associate Members must be made by a University of Chicago faculty member. Self-nominations are not accepted.
Tinker Visiting Professors
The Center's most robust visiting scholar program is its Tinker Visiting Professorship, which has brought more than 100 distinguished scholars to teach and conduct research at the University of Chicago since being endowed by the Edward Larocque Tinker Foundation in 1981. These quarter-long residencies allow for collaboration and relationship building with colleagues from Latin America, often leading to joint scholarly events and publications with UChicago faculty, and provide local contacts for graduate students doing fieldwork in the region. Our Tinker Visiting Professorship has opened productive and ongoing dialogue between our faculty and students and a network of distinguished scholars and practitioners in Latin America.
2022–23 Tinker Visiting Professors
ANTONI MIRALDA, Autumn 2022
Miralda, a Catalan multidisciplinary artist, is one of the most distinguished pioneers of “food art.” Representative works include Diner en quatre couleurs (with Dorothée Selz, Galerie Claude Givaudan, Paris, 1970), a sixty-diner event featuring color-coded dishes; Fest für Leda, (Documenta 6, Kassel, 1977); Breadline (Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, 1977); Wheat and Steak (Kansas City, 1981), a multi-day event including parades, a performance, and a meal at the Kansas City Board of Trade; Santa Comida (New York, Miami, Barcelona, Paris, 1984–2017), an interactive space centered on sacrificial offerings to Afro-Atlantic deities that emphasizes spatial movement; El Internacional (with Montse Guillen, New York City, 1984–86), a conceptual art tapas bar and restaurant (incidentally the first tapas bar in the U.S.) in Tribeca; and Sabores y Lenguas (1997–2007), a project realized in eight Latin American metropoles aiming to create a poetic archive of local foodways. Many of his works promote collective participation in a context of play and partying. His gastronomic ethnology has received widespread international recognition. Since 2000, Miralda has focused on the FoodCulturaMuseum, an archive of multiple projects based on research and reflection around food diversity and its relation to the cultures of the world.
Host: Department of Anthropology
Course: Foodcultura and Art in Latino America: Creating an Imaginary Museum as a Multidisciplinary Experience
MICHEL MISSE, Autumn 2022
Misse is professor in sociology at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), where he founded the Research Center on Citizenship, Conflict and Urban Violence (Nucleo de Estudos de Cidadania, Confito, e Violencia Urbana, NECVU). He is one of Brazil’s most prominent public intellectuals, a leading voice in national discussions and debates concerning crime, violence, policing, public security, and the rule of law. His publications include some of the seminal academic articles on crime and violence in Brazil, as well as key contributions to social theory broadly conceived, collected in several books, as well as agenda-setting edited volumes he has overseen and contributed to. He has also been Director of the UFRJ Academic Press and editor of its journal Dilemas and served on the editorial boards of a host of international social science journals.
Host: Department of Political Science
Course: Public Security and Violence in Latin America
LINDA BÁEZ RUBÍ, Autumn 2022
Báez Rubí is a leading art historian, visual theorist, and historian of ideas who has written extensively on colonial Mexico, early modern European humanist networks, and the emergence of twentieth-century models of visual anthropology. She is a tenured professor-researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She is the author and co-editor of a number of important books, including Mnemósine novohispánica: Retórica e imágenes en el siglo XVI (2005), in which she examines the foundations of the arts of memory in colonial Mexico and argues that they were a means of merging medieval arts of preaching with Nahuatl visual codes; the annotated translation of and book-length essay on the magnum opus of legendary scholar of visual culture Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the Mnemosyne Atlas (2013); and the collective volume Los itinerarios de la imagen: prácticas, usos y funciones (2011), in which the authors tackle the idea of cultural heritage from different perspectives based on a broad range of examples emphasizing the different spaces of display of the images, from depicted rituals on the walls of convents in New Spain to the display of corpses in contemporary Chinese art.
Host: Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Course: Viceroyalty of New Spain and Its Cultural History
PEDRO AMARAL, Spring 2023
Amaral is associate professor in economics at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. His research is focused on assessing the spatial configuration of regional inequalities in Brazil in terms of accessibility of health care, as well as other types of inequalities such as poverty, income, and crime. He has published 27 peer-reviewed papers in Brazilian and international journals and serves as early career coeditor of Spatial Economic Analysis and coeditor of Regional Studies, Regional Science and Journal of Spatial Econometrics.
Host: Department of Sociology
Course: Applied Multivariate Analysis for Social Scientists: An Overview with Latin American Data
ADRIÁN GORELIK, Spring 2023
Gorelik, a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, is one of the leading urban historians of Latin America. Since the publication of his influential La grilla y el parque. Espacio público y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 (1998), he has been one of the most important urban historians of the region. La grilla y el parque sought to understand the city as a self-contained form, not a direct product of social life, but as one of the constructive parts of society itself. It continues to be reprinted, and it is currently being translated into English as one of the “libros clave en estudios latinoamericanos” of the Latin American Studies Association. Other books include Miradas sobre Buenos Aires. Historia cultural y crítica urbana (2004); Das vanguardas a Brasília. Cultura urbana e arquitetura na América Latina (2005); Correspondencias. Arquitectura, ciudad, cultura (2011); and La sombra de la vanguardia. Hannes Meyer en México, co-authored with Jorge Francisco Liernur (2019). Trained originally as an architect, Gorelik approaches urban history in a unique way, blending urban planning, architecture, and social and cultural histories.
Host: Department of History
Course: The Latin American City: History of a Place and an Idea
Tinker Nominations
The Tinker Visiting Professorship is intended to provide prominent scholars (and other professionals) the opportunity to take up academic residence at the University of Chicago for the purpose of teaching, conducting research, and interacting with faculty and students at the University. Each spring, CLAS collects nominations from interested faculty sponsors; Tinker Visiting Professors must be nominated by University faculty and endorsed by University departments. Direct applications from scholars are not accepted. We solicit nominations approximately 20 months in advance of the year for which we are planning (e.g., Winter 2022 call for nominations and Spring deadline for the 2023–24 academic year). Please contact clas@uchicago.edu for more information.
Past Tinker Visiting Professors
The Tinker Foundation has created a database of the more than 400 distinguished scholars and practitioners who have served as Tinker Visiting Professors at the five US univeristies with endowments from the Foundation. Visit the Tinker Visiting Professors Database.