Meet Our Visiting Professors
Tinker Visiting Professor
The University of Texas at Austin is one of five major universities (with Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, and Wisconsin) to have a professorship endowed by the Edward Larocque Tinker Foundation. The goal of the Tinker Visiting Professor program has been to bring pre-eminent thinkers from Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula to the United States as a means of encouraging contact and collaboration among scholars. View past Tinker Visiting Professors.
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Marixa Lasso, Spring 2025 Tinker Visiting Professor
Historian and award-winning author Marixa Lasso is former director and current researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Antropológicas y Culturales in Panama. She is the author of the books Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution (Pittsburgh, 2007) and Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard, 2019), the latter of which received the Friedrich Katz Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in Latin American and Caribbean History and the William M. LeoGrande award for the best book on U.S.-Latin American relations in 2018–2019.
Professor Lasso is a member of the editorial board of the Hispanic American Historical Review. She has received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright and the Wenner Gren Foundation. During fall 2016, she was the Sheila Biddle Fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard. A strong proponent of public history, Lasso's opinion pieces have appeared in the Washington Post, El Espectador, La Prensa y la Estrella de Panamá."
Her spring 2025 graduate seminar, The Tropics and the Tropical City in Latin America, examines the tropics as an idea and looks at the history and legacy of this idea, eventually coming to focus on the tropical city in Latin America.
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Juan Pablo Abalo, Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Visiting Artist
Juan Pablo Abalo is a Chilean composer, producer, and recording artist whose credits include the soundtrack and musical production for the 2023 film El Conde, directed by Pablo Larraín. He is assistant professor at Universidad Aldolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, where he teaches history and aesthetics as reflections of cultures and the politics surrounding art. He is editor of Revista de Artes Liberales. Abalo is the guest of Adela Pineda Franco, LLILAS Director. Learn more about Abalo's work.
During spring 2025, Professor Abalo is teaching a course titled “Music, Power, and Politics in Latin America.”
Daniel Escotto
Daniel Escotto, Fall 2024 Tinker Visiting Professor
Daniel Escotto holds a master’s in arts and architecture studies from Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. He has been professor at the Department of Theory and History of Architecture at the School of Architecture of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) for the last 21 years and has taught studio and urban design at the Monterrey Tech for 10 years. His areas of research are 20th-century architectural heritage, the European diaspora of modernity in Latin American countries and its effects on the arts and architectural culture. Escotto also has profound expertise in implementation of projects and policies in urban public spaces and the relation to politics and civic culture.
Escotto had the responsibility of integrating the inscription dossier for the Central University City Campus of UNAM as a World Heritage Site (UNESCO 2007). He is former Public Space Authority of Mexico City Government (2008–2012) and the founder and director of the post-graduate program in Public Space and Urban Mobility at UNAM. From 2018 to 2020, Escotto led project development on public space and infrastructure improvement program, a nationwide action of the Federal Government of Mexico (SEDATU-PMU). He leads the Special Projects Office at UNAM’s School of Architecture and frequently lectures, writes, and publishes books and articles on arts, architecture, and urban culture.
His graduate course for fall 2024, Social Responsibility of Architecture and Urban Planning, will be cross-listed by Architecture and Urban Studies.
- Beatriz Jaguaribe, Spring 2024
Beatriz Jaguaribe is a professor in the School of Communication at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) since 1994. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, The New School for Social Research, New York University, and Stanford University, among other academic institutions. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Andrés Bello Chair (NYU), and an ICAS fellowship (NYU), Jaguaribe is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), under the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology.
Her areas of academic expertise are comparative literature, media studies, and urban culture, with publications that include the books Fins de século: cidade e cultura no Rio de Janeiro (1998), Mapa do maravilhoso (2001), O choque do real (2007), and Rio de Janeiro: Urban Life through the Eyes of the City (2014). Dr. Jaguaribe’s overall academic work focuses on three distinct thematic issues: urban imaginaries, inventions of the self in literature and visual culture, and representations of Latin American modernities and nation-building with special emphasis on Brazil. She taught a graduate seminar titled Environmental Imaginaries of Latin America. Learn more about the seminar.
Read Professor Jaguaribe's article in Portal magazine.
- Sueli Carneiro, Fall 2023
Sueli Carneiro is a renowned public figure known as the godmother of Black feminism in Brazil. Dr. Carneiro is the winner of numerous prestigious national and international awards, including the 2021 Kalman Silvert Award for lifetime achievement from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and the 2022 Jabuti Prize for literary excellence (akin to a Nobel Prize for Literature in Brazil). She is the first Black woman to be given an honorary doctorate from the University of Brasília (2022). Dr. Carneiro taught a graduate seminar titled Black Feminist Epistemologies, which surveys Black women’s epistemologies from a global South perspective. Focusing primarily on the work of Black Brazilian feminists (in Portuguese) and Spanish-speaking Black feminists from the Caribbean and Latin America, the course considered what it means to decolonize epistemologies as a Black feminist project.
Read "Learning with Sueli Carneiro" in Portal magazine.
- Víctor Zúñiga, Fall 2023
Víctor Zúñiga is professor of sociology at Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Facultad de Derecho y Criminología. He earned his doctorate from the Université de París VIII-Vincennes, France (1980–83). His current projects relate to child migrants circulating between the United States and Mexico, new destinations of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., and contemporary return migration from the United States to Mexico. His graduate seminar focused on child migration between the U.S., Mexico, and Central America from a child-centered perspective. The course also focused attention on two populations: Mexican-origin child migrants living in the United States, and U.S.-born children moving from the United States to Mexico.
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Visiting Resource Professors
Visiting Resource Professors are invited by UT Latin Americanist faculty members to lecture for one to two weeks in either undergraduate or graduate classes.
2022–23 Academic Year
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, an Argentine writer and public intellectual, is a leading figure in Latin American literature and a founder of the feminist movement #NiUnaMenos (“Not One Less”). Her novel Las aventuras de China Iron (translated as The Adventures of China Iron) was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker International Prize. During her visit to UT Austin, she will participate in a public conversation with Professor Gabriela Polit of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. The conversation will be in Spanish, free and open to the public, on September 27, at 4 p.m., in the Benson Latin American Collection second-floor conference room.
Crystal Fortwangler
Crystal Fortwangler is an Assistant Professor & Film Program Chair at La Roche University, as well as a filmmaker through her production company, Wider Angle Productions, LLC. Beginning with her dissertation on the preservation of U.S. Virgin Island (USVI) park land, she has spent decades working to develop products centered on the USVI in a variety of media. This includes four films all of which deal with the relationship between human beings and nature.
Hadiya Sewer
Hadiya Sewer, is a research affiliate in the African and African American Studies Program at Stanford University. She is co-founder and president of the St. John Heritage Collective, a nonprofit community land trust in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), and a founding member of the VI Studies Collective, a group of academics, artists, and activists whose work centers the USVI as a site of intellectual inquiry and theorization beyond the notion of utopia or unoccupied space.
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Sewer and Fortwangler will visit campus at the invitation of Professor Carlos Ramos-Scharrón (LLILAS / Geography & the Environment). Their visit will center on the screening of the documentary they co-produced, Reclaiming Our Island, about the U.S. Virgin Islands USVI; a workshop on engaged/activist scholarship related to their experiences in USVI; participation in the Latin American Studies Proseminar to discuss land issues related to the Insular Caribbean; and one-on-one discussions with Professor Ramos-Scharrón and his research group.
Fernando Rosenblatt
Fernando Rosenblatt is associate professor of political science and a researcher at the Universidad Diego Portales, in Santiago, Chile. His recent work explores the effects of big data on party organizations, examining how the use of big data impacts party organization structures; how it transforms, reduces, or increases a party’s internal democracy; and whether it improves channels of communication between elites and activists. At the invitation of Professor Kurt Weyland (Government), he will visit campus in January 2023 to deliver a public lecture about the sociopolitical consequences of party institutionalization.
Socorro Venegas
Socorro Venegas is an award-winning writer and editor whose recent publications include the novels Ceniza roja (2022), Vestido de novia (2014), and La noche será negra y blanca (2009), and the short story collection La memoria donde ardía (2019). Her works have been translated into English, French, and Portuguese. She has directed editorial projects for the Fondo de Cultura Económica, and, at UNAM, created the novel and memoir collection Vindictas, showcasing the work of marginalized Latin American women writers of the twentieth century. Venegas is a member of the honor committee of Centro para el Estudio de la Historia de la Lectura, directed by Alberto Manguel in Portugal, and director-general of publications and editorial development at UNAM. She writes the column Modo Avión for the literary e-magazine Literal Latin American Voices.