Edward Brudney

Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

Edward Brudney is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Dr. Brudney comes to UTC from Indiana University, where he completed his Ph.D. in History with a focus on modern Latin American legal and labor history. His current research project, titled Changing the Rules of the Game: Labor, Law, and Citizenship in Authoritarian Argentina, 1976-1983, analyzes attempts by Argentina's most recent military dictatorship to transform the meaning of citizenship by changing the country's labor laws. Dr. Brudney's recent work has appeared in the Journal of Religion & Society, the Journal of Global South Studies, and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History in the Americas. He's currently working on two additional projects: an interdisciplinary multi-authored book project about commemorations and justice work in Argentina, and a sociocultural history of an industrial town in Greater Buenos Aires that traces economic instability in people's daily lives. At UTC, he will regularly teach both Colonial and Modern Latin American History, as well as specialized courses in postcolonialism, authoritarianism, and populism. Dr. Brudney’s research interests, beyond labor and legal history, include the history of the State, nationalism/national identities, cultural history, and oral history.

Sebastian Carassai

Visiting Professor, General San Martín Chair, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Kevin Coleman

Kevin Coleman’s published work examines the intersection between capitalism and photography. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of the Banana Republic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), and a number of book chapters and journal articles. He is co-editor with Daniel James of Capitalism and the Camera (New York: Verso, 2021), a collection of original essays that examine the relationships between the histories and logics of capitalism and photography. He co-edited (with Daniel James and Jayeeta Sharma) an issue of the Radical History Review, “Photography and Work.” He is currently working on a documentary film, The Photos We Don’t Get to See, on photographs from the 1928 massacre of banana workers in Colombia. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and Fulbright-Hayes.

David Diaz Arias

Professor of History, Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central of Universidad de Costa Rica

David Diaz Arias (Ph.D. 2009) is Director of the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central of Universidad de Costa Rica where he became full professor of history in 2015. In 2016, he won the prestigious Luis FerreroAward for the best contribution in cultural research and the Academia de Geografía e Historia de Costa Rica Award for the best book of history—both honors due to his book Crisis Social y Memorias en Lucha: Guerra Civil en Costa Rica. He has been invited professor in several universities in Europe and Latin America. He is part of the scholarly group that the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany awarded for the founding of the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He has published several books and more than 60 scholarly essays. He also plays a significant role as a public intellectual in Costa Rica publishing op-ed pieces in newspapers and in on line journals. 

Sarah Foss

Assistant Professor, Oklahoma State University

Sarah Foss is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University and received her PhD from Indiana University in 2018. Her research focuses on the politics of Cold War era international development projects in Latin America and the ways that indigenous people interacted with, and often appropriated, these projects. Her current book project focuses on the ways that a diverse set of actors utilized discourses of international development to redefine the category of “the Indian” in an attempt to integrate the indigenous population into the nation. She not only focuses on the actions and motivations of policymakers but also emphasize the ways that indigenous people actively participated in these processes, often creating alternate versions of development and indigenous citizenship. My research has been supported by several grants, including an Oklahoma Humanities Council NEH-Funded Research Award and a Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship.

Stephanie Huezo

Post-Doctoral Fellow at Mount Holyoke College

Stephanie M. Huezo is a Latin American and Latinx historian. She received her PhD from Indiana University in 2019. As a transnational scholar, she specializes in histories of activism and resistance, particularly within the Latin American and Latinx context. Her research and teaching interests also include immigration, social movements, memory, and oral history. Huezo is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how Salvadorans in both El Salvador and the United States have used popular education as a political and educational tool of resistance against social oppression since the 1960s. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Mount Holyoke College.

Valeria Manzano

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Natalia Milanesio

Associate Professor of History, University of Houston, Texas

Natalia Milanesio is an associate professor of history at the University of Houston, Texas. Her book Workers Go Shopping in Argentina: The Rise of Popular Consumer Culture (University of New Mexico Press, 2013) was the winner of the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (RMCLAS) Thomas McGann Book Award for the best book published in 2013. In 2015, the book received the Book Prize in the Social Sciences by the Southern Cone Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Her book Cuando los trabajadores salieron de compras. Nuevos consumidores, publicidad y cambio cultural durante el primer peronismo (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2014) received Argentina’s Academia Nacional de la Historia 2017 Honorable Mention for Best History Book published in 2014-2015. She has published numerous articles in leading academic journals like the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, Gender and History, and Environmental History. In 2013, she was awarded the Leopold-Hidy Prize given annually by the American Society of Environmental History (ASEH) for the best article published in Environmental History and in 2011, she received the Sturgis Leavitt Award given annually by the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) for the best article on a Latin American or Iberian subject. Her new book, Destape: Sex, Democracy, and Freedom in Postdictatorial Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) is a history of sexuality in 1980s Argentina.

Timo Schaefer

Fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) at the Universidad de Guadalajara

Timo Schaefer works onthe social history of transnational ideas –such as liberalism, democracy, or human rights –in modern Mexico. His Ph.D. dissertation won both institutional and international prizes, and his bookLiberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-Colonial Mexico, 1820-1900(Cambridge University Press, 2017) was awarded the Best Social-Science Book Prize from the Mexico Section as well as an Honorable Mention in the Best-Book Competition from the Nineteenth-Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Among his current research projects are thelife history of an indigenous political activist who played an important role in late-twentieth century Mexicansocial movements, and a general history of Latin America that explores how the region came to be associated with a radical utopian politics.He hasheld teaching and research positions at the University of British Columbia, University of New Brunswick, Brandeis University, Boston University, and Royal Roads University,and is currently a fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS)at the Universidad de Guadalajara. 1 / 1

Heather Vrana

Assistant Professor of Modern Latin America in the Department of History at the University of Florida

Heather Vrana(Ph.D. Indiana University, 2013) is Assistant Professor of Modern Latin America in the Department of History at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on social movements, student movements, youth, disability, human rights, and photography in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. She is author of the monograph This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala (University of California Press, 2017) and the anthology Anti-colonial Texts from Central American Student Movements 1929-1983 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). She is co-editor with Julie Gibbings of Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2020). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Genocide Research and the Radical History Review, and elsewhere. Vrana is currently Communications Director of the Guatemala Scholars Network.