News and Announcements

Congratulations to Rutgers History PhD candidate Laura De Moya Guerra on receiving a 2026 Research Grant from the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH), one of Colombia’s principal institutions supporting historical and anthropological research. The award was granted through the competitive program “Sistemas de Vida Regionales en el Caribe Colombiano” and will support De Moya Guerra’s project, Migración y vida insular en el Caribe colombiano: presencia china en San Andrés,...

The Violences in Latin America Talk Series brought together scholars and audiences over the course of a year-long virtual program examining diverse forms and histories of violence across the region. Across the talks, speakers explored themes such as state and paramilitary violence, insurgencies and community resistance, postwar memory and victimhood, and the long-term political and social effects of conflict in Haiti, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico. Approximately 180 participants attended the...

Huge congratulations to the newly minted Dr. Joyce Lu! We are absolutely thrilled to share that Joyce recently defended her dissertation, “The Expert and the Healer: Trust, Public Health, and the Afterlives of Antibiotics in Guatemala.” Her research dives deep into antibiotic resistance, examining how trust, medicine, and public health intersect in the western highlands of Guatemala. Join us in celebrating this incredible milestone. Congratulations, Dr. Lu!

A massive shout-out to our very own Camilla Townsend! Being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the highest honors in the field, and we couldn’t be more excited to see her pioneering work in Aztec history recognized. Congratulations, Camilla, on this incredible milestone in your career! Camilla Townsend’s academic career was already off to a promising start at Colgate University in the 1990s when she took a summer class that would transform her work as a historian. The...

A few months ago, Geography PhD candidate and CLAS affiliate Jamie Gagliano co-authored an essential piece for the NACLA Report on the Americas that remains incredibly relevant today. In "In Paraguay, NGOs are Under Attack," Jamie and Michael Cary explore the rising legal pressures on civil society. As these political shifts continue to unfold in Paraguay, their analysis provides vital context on the global trend of targeting human rights organizations.

Join us in congratulating Gloria D'Alessio, Anthropology PhD candidate, on receiving the prestigious Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for her research on the Darién borderlands! This grant is awarded annually to support doctoral research in anthropology. This cycle was particularly competitive, with more than 1,600 applications received from around the world. Gloria, we wish you the best of luck in your fieldwork and look forward to following your research as it unfolds in the field!

Nathan Darmiento, a doctoral student in the Department of History at Rutgers University, successfully defended his dissertation research proposal on May 22 and has officially advanced to Ph.D. candidacy. His dissertation project, tentatively titled Between Nations, Among Neighbors: State Security and Everyday Life in the Mexico-Guatemala Borderlands, 1938–1980, examines how communities living along the Mexico-Guatemala border transformed and navigated state policies of incorporation and...

1. The MoMA ExperienceQ: Could you tell us a bit about your day-to-day work as a Cisneros Fellow at MoMA? As a Cisneros Fellow at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Diana Iturralde has spent the past two years navigating the intersection of academic research, curatorial practice, and public engagement within one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Working within the museum’s Drawings and Prints Department and alongside the Cisneros Institute, Iturralde has contributed to a wide-ranging...

Last Monday, April 20th, CLAS Postdoctoral Associate Dr. Vierelina Fernández gave her culminating Postdoc Research Talk to a full audience (both in-person and virtually on Zoom). Her talk centered on the theoretical advances of her current book project, tentatively titled Insurgent Feminism in Global Revolution: Lessons from Colombian and Kurdish Guerrilla Fighters. In her talk, Vierelina expanded on her conceptual framework of “war as generative process,” where she argues that war and...

We congratulate Laurian Rosa, Geography PhD candidate, on receiving the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. This fellowship, awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation, supports doctoral students pursuing innovative approaches to dissertation research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Laurian’s dissertation, titled “Colonial Remains: the afterlives of militarization and the politics of redevelopment in eastern Puerto Rico,”...

The Newark Public Library recently hosted an insightful academic forum titled "The Archives Speak: A Look at Jersey’s Latino History." Organized by the New Jersey Hispanic Research and Information Center (NJHRIC), the event brought together scholars and the community to explore the experiences and expansion of Latino populations in the state. The discussion focused on historical underrepresentation and the importance of preserving community narratives to shape identity and resilience. Among...

Join us for “International Law and (In)Justice: Venezuela, Extrajudicial Force, and Caribbean Impacts,”  a timely conversation exploring legal frameworks, human rights concerns, and regional implications. The event will be moderated by Vierelina Fernández and is co-sponsored by CLAS. We invite you to be part of this important discussion and engage with scholars and participants on these pressing issues. Don’t miss this opportunity, register here. More information here

Josh Anthony, CLAS grad student affiliate and PhD candidate in History, participated in the making of a children’s book about the Aztecs. We talked to him about this exciting project. Keep reading to find out about Josh’s experience.    Please give us some basic details about the book. The book is called The Aztecs: The Rise and Fall of a Mighty Empire, and it's middle-grade kids' book (so 9-12 years old) about the people of the Aztec Empire. It's published by the publishing company DK (owned by...

Several CLAS grad student affiliates participated in the NeMLA convention, contributing to panels that explored contemporary debates in Latin American literature, culture, and critical theory. Roni Lakin, PhD student in Comparative Literature, presented “Las sonrisas tienen dientes: Consumo, producción y mujeres caníbales en Fruta podrida” in the panel “Awakening Monsters in Latin America: From Eco-horror to Tech Doom.” His presentation explored the use of both literal and metaphorical...

The conference “Critical and Creative Perspectives from and about Colombia, its Territories, and Diaspora”  took place on February 27–28 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. The bilingual event, held in Spanish and English, brought together scholars, researchers, and activists to explore diverse perspectives on Colombia, its territories, and its diaspora. It was organized by the Colombian Studies Group (CSG), an initiative that promotes academic collaboration, cultural exchange, public...

Javiera Barrientos, a CLAS PhD candidate in English Literature, was awarded an Andrew Mellon Foundation Completion Fellowship in the Humanities. This prestigious and highly competitive award honors exceptional scholarly achievements and the significance of the recipient’s doctoral project. This year, it was granted to only five Rutgers PhD candidates. Javiera’s dissertation "Literary Landfills. Transoceanic Histories of Bibliographic Waste in the Early Modern World" examines the material and...

Laura De Moya-Guerra, a CLAS history grad student affiliate, was awarded an Andrew Mellon Foundation Completion Fellowship in the Humanities. This highly competitive fellowship recognizes outstanding academic trajectories and the significance of doctoral research; notably, only five fellowships were granted to Rutgers PhD candidates this year. Laura’s dissertation, “Chinese Immigrants and the Making of Modern Colombia, 1903-1980,” examines how Chinese migration shaped Colombia’s racial and...

Vierelina Fernández, Postdoctoral Scholar at Rutgers University’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), authored an opinion piece originally published in The Tennessean and later republished by Yahoo Entertainment and other outlets. In the article, she reflects on what the country music industry can learn from the global cultural impact of Bad Bunny, particularly in embracing Latino audiences and expanding beyond traditional genre boundaries. Fernández highlights how greater inclusivity...

We talked to Santos Rivera-Cardona about his experience as an intern with the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration, and this is what he shared with us. How did you end up working with the PRAC? In 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. At the time, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. When the university resumed operations, I witnessed firsthand the damage that months without electricity had caused to the archives of the Puerto Rican Collection at UPRM...

Creating a book that bridges five centuries and three languages is no small feat. After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest (2025, OUP)  is more than just an edited volume. This behind-the-scenes look at the project's evolution reveals how a traditional epilogue transformed into a deeply interwoven dialogue between past and present. In this conversation, Josh Anthony, PhD candidate in history as co-editor of the book, pulls back the curtain on the "1522 Collective," the...

CLAS affiliate Evelyn Saavedra Autry won the Meridians Journal's Paula J. Giddings Best Article Award for her article "Insurgent Memories of Armed Struggle: Self-representation by Female ex-Combatants in Peru," published in Vol. 24, No. 1. This award honors an author whose work embodies the groundbreaking nature and innovative spirit of Paula’s writing. Evelyn Saavedra Autry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her...

The CLAS is pleased to announce a new student working group organized by anthropology grad student Clive Echagüe! The CLAS student Working Group "Borders and In/Securities in the New Americas" brings together scholars and graduate students to discuss current border and migration issues across the hemisphere. It focuses on how new policies of deportation, anti-immigrant sentiment, externalized borders, migrant detention, and militarization are reshaping migration and the everyday lives of...

PhD candidate in History Clio Isaacson presented a conference paper at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), held in January in Chicago. As part of the panel “Women, Bodies, and Social Control,” Clio’s presentation examined portrayals of elite Spanish women in seventeenth-century Nahuatl-language histories. Her paper argued that colonial Nahua writers transferred ideas about the historical authority of elite Nahua women to Spanish queens, nuns, and virreinas...

Javier González, a PhD student in History, has published an analytical article on bullfighting in the city of Madrid, Colombia, in the newspaper El Espectador. The article, co-authored with Sandra Rojas, a university professor specializing in animal ethics, examines contemporary debates surrounding bullfighting and its ethical, cultural, and social implications. Javier is a doctoral student whose research focuses on animal history. His dissertation explores the history of horses and horse...

CLAS affiliate, Nicole Burrowes, participated in an engaging and well-attended panel titled “New Research on Empire and Labor in the Americas and Beyond” at the American Historical Association's annual meeting in Chicago in January. Burrowes discussed her book Seeds for Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana, which explores the historical possibility of a movement forged by those at the edges of empire amid economic, political, and environmental...

Please join us for a conversation about After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest, an anthology co-edited by Camilla Townsend, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers–New Brunswick, and Josh Anthony, PhD Candidate in History at Rutgers–New Brunswick and Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center at UPenn. The event will take place on Friday, February 20, 2026, from 1:00 to 2:30 PM, as a hybrid event with lunch included, at the Academic Building–West...

Josh Anthony, PhD candidate in History, published the article “Colonial Mesoamerican Ethnohistory: A Special Teaching and Research Collection for The Americas” in The Americas, a leading U.S. journal of Latin American history. The piece is a historiographic study of colonial Mesoamerican ethnohistory—that is, scholarship on Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America under Spanish rule—and examines how the field has evolved from the 1940s to the present through an analysis of articles and...

The Center for Latin American Studies congratulates Laura De Moya-Guerra, PhD candidate in History at Rutgers University, on being awarded a Vanderbilt University Library Travel Grant. This competitive award supports scholars whose research will benefit from the unique archival collections at Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries. De Moya-Guerra’s project, titled “Performing Diplomacy: Colombian Culture in China during the Early Cold War, 1950–1960,” explores how artists, dancers,...

We are delighted to share that the co-edited volume Adaptation and the Edge Effects of Latin American Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), edited by Professor Elena Lahr-Vivaz (Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies, Rutgers-Newark) and Elisabeth L. Austin (Virginia Tech) is now in print. We spoke with Professor Lahr-Vivaz about the origins of the volume, the conceptual force of the “edge effect” concept, and the diverse contributions that illuminate the intersections of Latin American...

Camilla Townsend and Frances Karttunen have just published How to Be Grateful: An Aztec Guide to the Art of Gratitude with Princeton University Press. We spoke with Townsend about the newly released book, and this is what she told us. What is the book about?How to be Grateful contains a set of dialogues written in the second half of the 16th century by an Indigenous man in Texcoco (Tesh-KO-ko), Mexico. Texcoco was one of three cities that had composed the Aztec Triple Alliance just two...

We are delighted that our PhD student in History, Sandra Acocal, presented her paper “Rupturas en la Casa noble india del Centro de México en el siglo XVI. Mujeres indias que alegaron derechos desde el sistema legal español” at the Congreso Internacional Nuevas Historias held in the city of Murcia, Spain, from December 1 to 3, 2025. Drawing on 16th-century indigenous language sources, Sandra explained the contradictions and adaptations of indigenous and Spanish cultural and legal forms in the...

The Center for Latin American Studies is pleased to share the news of a new publication by Franklin Moreno, former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and the Department of Psychology–Newark at Rutgers University, and now Assistant Professor of Research in the Criminal Justice Department and the Public Policy Lab at Temple University. Franklin is co-author of the chapter “Relaciones de poder asociadas a la violencia comunitaria en San Pedro Sula:...

The Center for Latin American Studies is delighted to welcome Sylvia Cifuentes as a Visiting Scholar for the 2025–2026 academic year. Sylvia comes to Rutgers from Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, MA), where she serves as Assistant Professor of Environmental and Social Equity and Justice in the Department of Environmental Studies. Sylvia is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in environmental justice, Indigenous geographies, global climate politics, and decolonial studies, with a...

We are so happy to share the news that Gloria D'Alessio PhD student in Anthropology, won the Honorable Mention Award for her short film Women and Academia: Gender Violences and Inequalities in Chile. We talked to Gloria about her accomplishments, and here is what she shared with us: Gloria, tell us more—what is the film about?The film explores the ongoing gender inequalities that persist in Chilean academia, particularly within the social sciences. The first part follows a researcher who...

The Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) is pleased to co-sponsor the Congreso Internacional Nuevas Historias 2025, an academic gathering that will take place from December 1–3, 2025, at the University of Murcia (Spain). Organized under the theme “Repensar los márgenes: identidades, discursos y prácticas frente al poder,” the conference brings together scholars developing innovative historical approaches that challenge traditional narratives, foreground subaltern actors, and rethink the...

Andrés M. F. González-Saiz, PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University (2024), contributed a chapter to the open-access book “Filosofía y Violencias: Espectros del siglo XXI,” edited and published by the Walter Benjamin Foundation (Colombia). The book brings together six authors who explore the relationships between violence, power, political imaginaries, and collective life in Latin America and beyond. In his chapter “Curators of Martyrdom: Victimization, Affects, and Culture Wars...

We are delighted to share that Celeste Wagner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University since Fall 2024, has just published her coauthored book, The Patina of Distrust: What People Do with Misinformation (MIT Press). The book, which focuses on Argentina—her home country—will soon be available as an open-access title. The Patina of Distrust examines how people in Argentina interpret and act on misinformation in their everyday lives, emphasizing reception...

Ulla D. Berg (Associate Professor, Latino & Caribbean Studies and Anthropology) and Gloria D'Alessio (Anthropology PhD student) recently presented their research at the World Anthropological Union (WAU) Congress, a major biannual gathering bringing together scholars from across the globe. Ulla, together with Ana Ramos-Zayas, co-organized the panel “Migrant Sheltering and Unsheltering in the Americas,” which examined the practices, politics, and ethics of sheltering and its role in migration...

Camilla Townsend, Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, has been elected to the British Academy—the United Kingdom’s preeminent institution for the humanities and social sciences. Recognized for her groundbreaking work that brings the voices of the Aztec people to life through their own words, Townsend becomes the first Rutgers faculty member ever elected to the Academy in its 123-year history, and one of only a few American scholars from public...

We are delighted to welcome Professor Jana Morgan to Rutgers! Having recently joined the Department of Political Science, she is now part of the vibrant community at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). In this brief introduction, we share a glimpse into her academic background, her trajectory, and her current work at Rutgers. Welcome to Rutgers and to the CLAS community! Can you tell us a bit about your background and what brought you to this point in your academic journey? I am...

The American Historical Association (AHA) has announced the winners of its 2025 prizes, recognizing Jazmín Puicon (Bard Early College–Newark), a PhD graduate in History from Rutgers University, as one of the honorees. Puicon received the Beveridge Family Teaching Award for excellence and innovation in K–12 teaching, an award that “honors the Beveridge family’s long-standing commitment to the AHA and K–12 teaching. Friends and family members endowed this award to recognize excellence and...

We are delighted to celebrate the publication of Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz, the new book by Karma Frierson, who was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and is currently Assistant Professor at the Frederick Douglass Institute & Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. In this compelling study, the author explores how Blackness—both Afro-Caribbean and regionally...

The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance (NJSAA), in collaboration with the History & Preservation Section of the New Jersey Library Association, Rutgers University Press, and Special Collections and University Archives of Rutgers University Libraries, has announced the recipients of its 2025 Author Awards. These annual awards honor outstanding publications that offer new insights into New Jersey’s history and culture through original research and innovative use of local resources. This year’s...

Laura De Moya-Guerra, PhD candidate in History, was selected as one of the 2025 recipients of the Open Educational Resources (OER) in Caribbean Studies, awarded by the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) at the University of Florida. De Moya-Guerra proposed the creation of a multilingual digital project titled “The Anti-Chinese Caribbean: Restrictive Immigration Legislation.” The project traces and interprets the history of anti-Chinese immigration laws across the Spanish and English...

Jennifer Vilchez, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, has recently published a chapter titled “How We Became Latinx: The Role of Data on Identity in the Twenty-first Century” in the new volume Constructed Latinx(s) Identities: Racialized Bodies in Visual and Textual Culture, edited by José I. Lara. In “How We Became Latinx,” Jennifer analyzes Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer as a conceptual metaphor to develop her theoretical concept of “tethering.”...

The Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Professor Renzo S. Aroni Sulca (New York University, Department of Spanish & Portuguese and of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies), titled Pactos de Alianza: How Communities Resisted the Shining Path Insurgency in Peru. This event is part of the "Violences in Latin America" Talk Series and will take place online on Tuesday, October 28, at 7:00 p.m.  This talk examines the prehistory of the...

Inspired by the 500-year anniversary of the conquest of Mexico—and the political climate of the COVID-19 pandemic—Rutgers scholars and collaborators launched a project to re-examine the tumultuous years following the fall of Tenochtitlan. The idea emerged in a conversation between Celso Mendoza (then a Rutgers PhD student, now Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago) and Josh Anthony (Rutgers doctoral candidate). Their advisor, Camilla Townsend, organized a CLAS-sponsored...

We are pleased to announce that Javiera Madrid-Salazar, Ph. D. student in Geography, will serve as the Graduate Student Representative for the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). Javiera’s work sits at the intersection of political ecology, Science and Technology Studies, and postcolonial theory. Her research uses qualitative methods to analyze historical and contemporary resource extraction in Latin America. By focusing on the historical development of the mining sector in Chile,...

We are pleased to announce the publication of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Volume 59, Number 1 (March 2025), guest-edited by Professor Marcy Schwartz (Rutgers University, Department of Spanish & Portuguese), who also contributes her own article to the dossier, Disrobed: Bodily Spectacles and the Dislocation of Exile in Rereading Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel and Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos. This special issue, titled "Reading in the Time of Media Multiplicity: Practices from...

The Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Professor Pablo Piccato (Columbia University, Department of History), titled A Brief History of Violence in Mexico. This event is part of the Lecture Series on Violence in Latin America and will take place online on Wednesday, November 19, at 12:00 p.m.  In this talk, Piccato will argue that violence in twentieth-century Mexico has a history: it is neither the product of “national character” nor the inevitable...