News and Announcements

CLAS Director and Professor Aldo Lauria-Santiago and CLAS Executive Committee Member and Associate Professor Ulla Berg have published a new book titled "Latinos/as in New Jersey" alongside 20 other contributors, listed below. This book brings together innovative and empirically grounded scholarship from different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study and addresses topics including the demographic history of Latinos in the state, Latino migration from gateway cities to suburban...

Member of the Center for Latin American Studies, PhD Candidate from the Department of English, and Folger Shakespeare Fellow, Javiera Barrientos, has been awarded as the Bibliographical Society of America's D.F. McKenzie New Scholar. She will present, online and in person, her research “Literary Landfills. Bibliographic Waste and its Representations” , where she examines the circulation, uses and representations of bibliographic waste found in viceregal vellum limp-bindings held at the...

Andrés M. F. González-Saiz recently published his article "Between ‘Reproachable Alterities’ and ‘Irredeemable Others’: Violence, Morality, and the Limits of Ethnographic Understanding". This article critically examines how moral frameworks shape the ethnographic understanding of violence, introducing the categories of "reproachable alterities" and "irredeemable others" to explore the ethical and methodological challenges of studying perpetrators of violence. It draws on ethnographic data...

Professor Ulla Berg was quoted and included in the article "On TikTok, Every Migrant Is Living the American Dream" by Jordan Salaam in The New Yorker. This article was digitally published on January 6, 2025 and in the print edition on the January 13, 2025 issue with the headline “The TikTok Trail.” This article discusses the discrepancy between what immigrants from the Andes region experience in their day-to-day lives living in New York, compared to what they document online on TikTok. It...

On November 14–15, the Universidad del Norte en Barranquilla, Colombia, hosted the inaugural colloquium Caribe Andino: conexiones entre ambiente, paz e identidades culturales. This event marked the first scholarly initiative to examine the historical interconnections between two of Colombia's most distinctive geographic regions: the Caribbean and the Andes. The colloquium brought together historians, anthropologists, and sociologists whose presentations explored the social, cultural, and...

Ariela Parisi successfully defended her dissertation on November 15, passing without revisions. Her dissertation, advised by Dr. Marcy Schwartz, explores the role of collective memory in imagining communal futures. It examines contemporary Latin American cultural expressions—performances, films, and novels—that engage in what Parisi terms retro-speculation. These works revisit the past to envision emancipatory futures while challenging the notion of time as linear and its association with...

Emma Oslé, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and former lecturer in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, recently earned the Big 10 Academic Alliance/Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in American Art with the Smithsonian Museum. The Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program (SIFP) offers the Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellowship to doctoral candidates who are enrolled in one of the Big Ten Academic Alliance universities. The specific fellowship...

This past Friday, November 15, 2024, the Center of Latin American Studies hosted their Fall 2024 Research Symposium, in which several Rutgers graduate students, PhD Candidates, and post-docs presented their work on Latin America. Below you'll find a list of presenters, as well as a link to read their abstracts, and pictures from the event. Presenters:Laura De Moya-GuerraSandra AcocalVierelina FernandezGabriela DuncanJian RenJavier GonzalezNia CambridgeJaviera BarrientosAlexander...

Dalia Griñan has won the Lydia Cabrera Award for her paper "Tracing Intimate Knowledge: African Women in Nineteenth Century Urban Cuba". The Lydia Cabrera Award was awarded by the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH) and aims to support the study of Cuba between 1492 and 1868. Rutgers faculty member Kathleen Lopez is also the Chair of the Prize Committee for this award.  Griñan is a PhD student in the Rutgers New Brunswick History department with concentrations in Atlantic/Diaspora and Gender...

Please read below for a message from the State of New Jersey's Center for Hispanic Policy, Research and Development (CHPRD) Program Development Assistant, Arely Hernandez, MHS: I’m pleased to share that the Center for Hispanic Policy, Research, and Development (CHPRD) is currently inviting applications for the 2025 class of the Governor’s Hispanic Fellows Program. We are aiming for the largest class in the program’s history, welcoming 35 students to participate in leadership development and...

Professor Ulla Berg, an Associate Professor at the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Anthropology, has received a fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, alongside fellow Rutgers faculty Jessey Choo, Marisa J. Fuentes, Eric Gawiser, and Alex Kontorovich.  Berg's research  focuses on historical and contemporary processes and experiences of migration and mobility within Latin America and between this region and the United States. She has...

Dr. Evelyn Saavedra Autry received her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia. Her research creates a conversation between various fields of knowledge, particularly Indigenous epistemologies, and pedagogies, literature, cultural studies on (de)coloniality, and gender studies, through the analysis of Andean women’s identity formations. In her current book project, Race, Gender, and Memory in Narratives of the Andes, Dr...

The Center of Latin American Studies extends a warm welcome to several new affiliate faculty members from the Rutgers Newark and Camden campuses. A brief biography of each faculty member is outlined below. Juan Arredondo: Juan Arredondo is a Colombian American documentary photographer who has chronicled human rights and conflict in Colombia, Venezuela, and Central America. Since 2014, he has been reporting on the use of child soldiers by illegal armed groups in Colombia, the peace agreement between...

Kaysha Corinealdi is  the author of Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press, 2022), with other publications in Radical History Review, Public Books, the American Historical Review, Social Text, The Washington Post, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and more. She is currently on the editorial board of the Global Black Thought journal and the University of North Carolina Press Latinx History Series and is an active member of the...

The American Society for Ethnohistory held their annual meeting, which was titled this year as "Colonial (dis)Entanglements", on September 18-21 in Fargo, North Dakota. Several Rutgers PhD candidates and graduates were in attendance, including: Celso Armando Mendoza, Bridge to Faculty postdoc at the University of Illinois Chicago and a recent Rutgers History PhD graduate; Joshua Anthony, current Rutgers History PhD candidate; Clio Isaacson, current Rutgers History PhD candidate; Peter...

Professor Shantee Rosado has co-written a book with four other Black feminist sociologists who form the group The Cardi B Collective. The book, titled The Sociology of Cardi B: A Trap Feminist Approach, creatively engages with the topics of Black and Latinx femininity, motherhood, sexuality, racial and ethnic identity, and political engagement through the life and artistic work of Hip Hop artist Cardi B. By centering the lived experiences and social positions of the Black women Cardi...

Vierelina Fernández joined Rutgers University as a Postdoctoral Scholar and Instructor in the Fall of 2024. She obtained her Ph.D. in International Relations from Florida International University in Miami (a city often referred to as the “gateway to Latin America”) shortly before arriving in New Jersey. Her doctoral dissertation was titled “Insurgent Feminism: An Empirical Comparative Analysis of the Colombian FARC and Kurdish PKK-YPG’s Guerrillas’ Contributions to Gender Equality”. Currently,...

Pictured: Activists, including ​​María Herrera Magdaleno at the mic, on the panel about forced disappearance in Latin America Every year, the Latin American Studies Association, also known as LASA, hosts a conference in which presenters and academics from all over the world come together to discuss important topics regarding Latin America and the Caribbean. According to LASA, it is the “largest professional association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin...

The Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG) was held from May 22-26 in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Several Rutgers academics were in attendance as panelists, organizers, and presenters. Below you’ll find more details about these professors, as well as the titles of their presentations, if applicable.  Wednesday, May 22: Daniela Mosquera was a presenter for the panel titled “Environmental Justice”. Mosquera’s presentation was Lessons and Complexities of a (Just) Energy Transition in...

The Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration Receives Major Funding from the Mellon Foundation The Rutgers/Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration, Directed by Prof. Aldo Lauria Santiago, is proud to announce that the Mellon Foundation, (Mellon.org) through its Presidential Initiatives, has awarded a million dollar grant to support the work of the PRAC over the next three years. This funding will enhance the ongoing efforts to preserve and make accessible important archival collections and...

History Ph.D. candidate Joshua Anthony participated in a Summer Fellowship in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, which is a research library and museum in Washington D.C. He spent all of June and July working on the first chapter of his dissertation after half a year spent researching in the archives of Mexico City. More information on that summer fellowship is available here: https://www.doaks.org/research/fellowships-and-awards/research-fellowships. His biography on the Dumbarton Oaks...

Rutgers Ph.D. student of History, Nathan Darmiento, recently attended the annual VOCES Oral History Research Summer Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. It is a week-long workshop led by Dr. J. Todd Moye, a historian at the University of North Texas with an interest in the US Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. Maggie-Rivas Rodriguez, a professor of journalism at The University of Texas at Austin who has extensive journalistic experience. Dr. Maggie-Rivas Rodriguez is also the founder...

Distinguished Professor of History Camilla Townsend has published a new book titled The Aztec Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Stories and Legends with publisher Thames and Hudson. The book is described on their website as being “the essential guide to the world of Aztec mythology, based on Nahuatl-language sources that challenge the colonial history passed down to us by the Spanish.”  Having published other works such as Indigenous Life After the Conquest, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, and Fifth...

Rutgers History Ph.D. candidate Laura De Moya-Guerra was recently awarded the 2024 Joe Arbena Latin American Sport History Grant by the North American Sport History Association (NASSH) at their annual conference. She was awarded the grant for her paper, “Canastas y clavados: la disputa deportiva y diplomática entre Taiwán y China en Colombia 1970-1980” / “Baskets and Slam Dunks: The Diplomatic Sporting Dispute Between Taiwan and China in Colombia 1970-80,” which she presented during the sports...

Please visit the Director's Message page for a summary of this year's work and challenges.  Thanks to all who contributed to the development of the Center's work this year.

Our extraordinary undergraduate program assistant graduates!  Hely will be pursuing a career in banking (she already has a job lined up).  Hely managed many aspects of CLAS work and also ran programs for the PRAC and LSRI including events, news, weekly calendar, flyers, scanning for the Puerto Rico digital library, zoom meetings, faculty publications, and all sorts of other event and information coordination.  We wish her good luck and congratulate her for receiving her degree.

 Ph.D. student in History, Jian Ren, published "Beyond Revolutions: Mao-Era China’s Market Entry Strategies in Latin America" in Business History. The article asks how the People’s Republic of China develop commercial relations with the Global South during its Maoist years  It explores the question through China’s market entry strategies in Latin America. Latin America posed significant challenges for Mao-era China in establishing robust relations.

Ph.D. student Clio Isaacson has received the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships for her project: Women of the Nahuatl Annals: Writing the Lives of Women in Late Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Mexico, advised by Prof. Townsend.  Clio and one other student in the history Ph.D. program was selected from a pool of over 500 applicants.. 22 Fellows were chosen. For the announcement click here.

CLAS sponsored a successful virtual roundtable on the study of mobilities and migration in Central America.  Hosted by former Post Doctoral Associate Briana Nichols, the roundtable brought together Noelle Bridgden, Rebecca Galemba, Amelia Frank Vitale and Caitlyn Yates for an extended conversation on their research and the challenges of fieldwork in vulnerable communities.  Forty three people came together to listen to their presentations which ranged from conceptual debates to practical advice on...

On Wednesday, March 20, 2024, CLAS hosted a successful Lunchtime Talk event with speaker Carolina Sánchez, Colombian writer and researcher. Sánchez is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American Literature at Rutgers University and a co-editor of the Latin American Platform for Environmental Humanities.  The presentation for the day was titled: "Environmental Historical Memory: Aesthetic Interventions in Contemporary Latin America." This interdisciplinary environmental research delves into how artistic...

Congratulations to Franklin Moreno,  postdoctoral fellow at The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers for co-writing and publishing  a new article  in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations. The article, titled:  ’When someone is in a safe place, I believe that your mind rests“ emotional security amid community violence: A cross-national study with youth in Newark, New Jersey, USA, and San Pedro Sula, Cortes, Honduras.  Youth are impacted by...

Documenting the Narratives of Puerto Rican Migration, 1945-1980 PRAC Director Aldo Lauria Santiago and Professor Ismael Garcia Colon (College of Staten Island & Graduate Center, CUNY) have been awarded a small grant for the organizing and digitizing documents related to migration at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. The funding received from the US Latino Digital Humanities Center of Arte Publico Press will support 18-20 weeks of work recovering the stories and documentation of Puerto Rican...

See Briana Nichols's review of Sarah Foss. On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022 in the most recent Hispanic American Historical Review ((2024) 104 (1): 154–156).

The Latina/O/X Initiatives For Service, Training And Assessment (LISTA) program is thrilled to share that for a second year in a row, incoming Master of Social Work (MSW) students are eligible to apply for our $10,000 bilingual scholarships! Additionally, we are excited to offer opportunities for both a scholarship and a $4,000 practicum stipend. To be considered, students must be bilingual and enroll in the Latina/o/x Initiatives for Service, Training, and Assessment (LISTA) Certificate...