Faculty Research Awards

The following faculty affiliates have received support to attend the 2024 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress, taking place June 12–15 in Bogotá.

• Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese)
• Boris Corredor (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese)
• Lina Del Castillo (Dept. of History / LLILAS)
• Raúl Madrid (Dept. of Government)
• Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez (Dept. of History)
• Sergio Romero (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese / LLILAS)
• Cristina Soriano (Dept. of History)
• John Turci-Escobar (Butler School of Music)

Brent Crosson (Dept. of Religious Studies)
Research Project: The Other Anthropocene: Climate Change and the Cosmopolitics of Energy
Country: Trinidad and Tobago

Kenneth Greene (Dept. of Government)
Research Project: Mexico's 2024 Elections
Country: Mexico

Kelly McDonough (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese)
Research Project: Nahua Women, Migration, and Tourism—Female Beach Vendors
Country: Mexico

Astrid Runggaldier (Dept. of Art and Art History)
Research Project: Archaeological Historiography and Collecting of Guatemalan Textiles
Country: Guatemala

Sandro Sessarego (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese)
Research Project: Afro-Veracruz Spanish
Country: Mexico

Rebecca Torres (Dept. of Geography)
Research Project: Mexican Child Displacement, Migration, and Asylum
Country: Mexico

Enzo Vasquez Toral (Dept. of Theatre and Dance)
Research Project: Queer and Trans Folklore in the Peruvian Central Andes
Country: Peru

Tinker Visiting Professors

• Néstor Rodríguez (Sociology) and Luis Urrieta (Curriculum and Instruction), sponsors; Víctor Zúñiga (Sociology, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, MX), fall 2023 visiting professor
• Christen A. Smith (Anthropology, African & African Diaspora Studies), sponsor; Sueli Carneiro (Director and Co-Founder, Geledés, São Paulo, BR), fall 2023 visiting professor
• Lorraine Leu (Spanish & Portuguese / LLILAS), sponsor; Beatriz Jaguaribe (Communication, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, BR), spring 2024
   

Visting Resource Professors

• Daniel Fridman (Sociology / LLILAS), sponsor; Mariana D. Luzzi (Universidad Nacional de San Martín–CONICET, Argentina), VRP spring 2024 
• Raúl Madrid (Government), sponsor; Luis L. Schenoni (University College, London / CIDE, Mexico), VRP spring 2024
• Lorraine Leu (Spanish & Portuguese / LLILAS), sponsor; Charlene Bicalho, performance artist, Brazil, VRP fall 2023 

The purpose of the Faculty Course Release Program is to offer LLILAS affiliated facutly the opportunity to engage in research and/or creative intellectual projects by offering course release for either the fall or spring semester.

Awardees: A faculty committee has selected the projects of Daniel Fridman (LLILAS/Sociology) and Robin Moore (Butler School of Music) for the 2023–24 Faculty Course Release. 

Daniel Fridman, LLILAS and Department of Sociology
In his current research project, Fridman studies the role of money in therapeutic practices among Argentine psychologists. Through this lens, he examines everyday cultural uses of money in contemporary society and moral tensions around its role. Fridman is author of Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (2016), also available in Spanish as El sueño de vivir sin trabajar.

Robin Moore, Butler School of Music
Moore's research project focuses on the growing and transforming role of violin performance, or toques de violín, in Afro-Cuban religious rituals. This is a virtually undocumented form of music-making. Moore is author, most recently, of the book Danzón: Diálogos de música y baile por la cuenca del Caribe (2020, with Alejandro Madrid) and the book chapter "The Cuban Son, Race, and Transculturation" (2022), in The Cambridge Companion to Caribbean Music.

An endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides funding for faculty to carry out summer research on topics focusing on Latin America. Meet the 2023 Mellon Travel Grant awardees.

Paola Canova, LLILAS / Department of Anthropology
Project title: Outlaw Cattle: Ranching and the Politics of Nature in the Paraguayan Chaco

Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Project title: The Diamond Man: Luis Barragán, Emotional Architecture and the Queerness of Mexican Modernity

Daniel Fridman, LLILAS / Department of Sociology
Project title: Money Transferences: The Payments for Psychotherapy in Argentina

Kenneth Greene, Department of Government
Project title: Political Accountability in Mexico 

Kelly McDonough, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Project title: Native Justice and Land in Colonial Cholula

Carlos Ramos-Scharrón, LLILAS / Department of Geography and the Environment
Project title: Bathymetric Surveys of Key Water Reservoirs in Puerto Rico

Sergio Romero, LLILAS / Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Project title: Lenguas Generales and Spanish Colonialism: A Comparative Study of Quechua and Nahuatl 

Iyaxel Cojti Ren, Department of Anthropology traveled to Guatemala to conduct research for her project "K'iche' expansionism and the politics of the Maya highlands during the Postclassic period." This is a continuation of her research on the geopolitics of the Maya highlands during the Postclassic period (900–1524 CE), where she is reconstructing the political networks among various Postclassic political units. According to Cojti Ren, “the few investigations that have been carried out on the archaeology of the Maya highlands focus on the history and culture of single sites without considering their political and economic interactions at the regional level over time. This research would be the first attempt to apply the network theory in the Maya highlands from a diachronic approach. Network theory focuses on the use of networking techniques to explore aspects of regional connectivity over time.”

Kenneth Greene, Department of Government: Under the heading of “Political Accountability in Mexico,” Greene will conduct fieldwork in Mexico to further work on two different research projects. The first is a book manuscript in progress about vote buying and the quality of democracy. Greene describes vote buying as a systemic attempt to “buy citizens’ votes” by offering “selective access to material benefits and services.” One of the questions he asks is, Is it effective? His second project, a newer one, examines political organization in Mexico’s 30,000-plus ejidos. “The degree of centralization or decentralization in ejidos governance impacts multiple aspects of rural life,” writes Greene, “including the distribution of resources among ejido residents, the quality of public services, feelings of community integration, and the ability to resist the incursion of outside actors ranging from clientelist political parties to criminal organizations. Surprisingly, there is as yet no social science research on the variation in ejido governance.”

Gabriela Polit, Department of Spanish & Portuguese: Polit’s summer research concerns her project titled “Female Fantasies: Trauma and Drive in Difficult Times.” Citing sobering statistics about the high rate of femicide in Latin America, especially Mexico, Argentina, and Ecuador, Polit notes that women’s movements in these countries have achieved unparalleled strength. “Grief and drive, and trauma and activism, operate on a compass with a complex and intriguing aesthetic balance in women’s contemporary literary works,” writes Polit. She plans to look at a range of works by Latin American women authors, conduct interviews with the authors, and explore the specific contexts in which the works were created. In writing about the works in conversation with one another, Polit says she will pay special attention to “the rich intersections between fantasy and creativity; vulnerability and ethics; mourning and the construction of political selves; and syntax and the representation of fear.” 

Faculty Research Leave

The purpose of Faculty Research Leave is to provide LLILAS faculty with the opportunity to engage in productive and creative intellectual projects, otherwise impossible to achieve during the course of the academic year.

Lina Del Castillo, LLILAS and Department of History
Del Castillo conducted research during 2022–23 for her book project titled "Colombia’s Paper Empire: Cosmopolitanism, Print Culture, and Geopolitics in the Age of Revolution." This book traces how "Columbia," a poetic late-eighteenth-century name that set Anglo-America off from Britannia, came to evoke, by the turn of the century, a “Columbian” project to unite the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, which eventually morphed into the massive and short-lived Gran Colombian Republic from 1819 to 1830. The book follows the initial "Columbian" vision for North and South America as it migrated to Europe via cosmopolitan Spanish Americans only to return in the form of a Latinized continental "Colombia."

Del Castillo was the faculty organizer of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” She is the author of Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (U of Nebraska Press, 2018).