Meet our Winter 2025 Tinker Visiting Professors

It is our pleasure to present our incoming Tinker Visiting Professors for Winter 2025:

Dr. Luciana Luz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Demography at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil, with a Ph.D. in Demography from Arizona State University. As a prominent demographer, Dr. Luz focuses on broad population issues, including fertility and mortality in Latin America and Mozambique. She is recognized for her methodological contributions, particularly in linking death registry data to sample surveys. Dr. Luz is also noted for her work on education and inequality and has published extensively in top journals using new data sources from countries like Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, and Mozambique.

Her recent research explores gender, time allocation, and labor market outcomes for women, as well as income inequality and family structure in Guatemala. Her studies also address gender inequalities in Colombia, fertility behavior in Brazil and Mozambique, and the educational gradient on adult mortality in Chile. Additionally, she examines how health and early childhood conditions impact children's educational outcomes in Brazil.

She will be teaching Introduction to Demographic Methods: An Application to Latin America.

Carlos Soto Román is an acclaimed poet, translator, and literary critic, known for his dynamic contributions to the creation and comparative study of poetry and translation across languages.

Soto Román has authored nine books or chapbooks of poetry in Spanish, including notable works such as 11 (2017), Chile Project [Re-Classified] (2015), Haikú Minero (2007), Tercera Estrofa (2022), and La Marcha de los Quiltros (1999). His poetry has been translated into English and German, with publications in Australia, England, Germany, and Spain. As an accomplished translator, he has translated works by prominent North American poets such as Alexis Almeida, Derek Beaulieu, Victoria Chang, Craig Dworkin, Charles Reznikoff, Aram Saroyan, Ron Silliman, and Frank Sherlock. His creative work has earned awards in Chile and abroad, and his collaborations have been showcased in festivals and exhibitions in Argentina, France, Germany, Mexico, and Norway. His recent book 11, which explores the 1973 Chilean military coup and subsequent dictatorship through documentary poetics, received the Municipal Poetry Prize in 2018 and was published in English in June 2023 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

He will be teaching Writing the Unspeakable: History, Memory, and Reflection through Literature.