Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
CLACS

Affiliated Faculty

Africana Studies

Geri Augusto

Geri Augusto, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Director, Undergraduate Development Studies, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Affiliations include the Center for Study of Slavery and Justice, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Portuguese & Brazilian Studies, Science, Technology & Society. 

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Anthony Bogues, Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory and Professor of Africana Studies. Specializations: Caribbean Studies.

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Patsy Lewis, 2020-2023 CLACS Director and Visiting Professor of Africana Studies. Watson Faculty Fellow. Specializations: Regional integration, small states development, Caribbean. 

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Brian Meeks, Professor of Africana Studies. Specializations: Social and political movements in the Caribbean.

American Studies

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Leticia Alvarado, Assistant Professor of American Studies. Specializations: Political contours of Latino abject aesthetic strategies.

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Kevin Escudero, Assistant Professor of American Studies. Specializations: Comparative ethnic studies, critical refugee studies, immigration and citizenship, law and society, and social movements. 

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Ralph Rodríguez, Associate Professor of American Studies, Ethnic Studies, and English. Director of Graduate Studies. Specializations: Latinx lit. and culture, graphic novels and comic books, queer theory, race, and ethnicity.

Anthropology

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Paja Faudree, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Specializations: Indigenous social movements, language, politics, ethnicity, and nationalism, Mexico, Ecuador. 

Shanti Morell-Hart

Shanti Morell-Hart,  Associate Professor of Anthropology. Research interests include health and disease, archaeology, ethnoecology, foodways, and paleoethnobotany.

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Stephen Houston, Dupee Family Professor of Social Science. Professor of Anthropology and the History of Art and Architecture. Specializations: Writing systems, anthropology of the body and gender, decipherment, Mesoamerican culture, Pre-Columbian and Mayan art, and writing. 

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political-legal and medical anthropology. 

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Jessaca Leinaweaver, Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Anthropology. Specializations: Transnational migration, adoption, child agency in Peru.

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Andrew Scherer, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology. Specializations: Archeology of Mesoamerica.

Parker VanValkenburgh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Specializations: Landscapes, politics, and environmental change in the Early Modern World, particularly in late pre-Hispanic and early colonial Peru.

Archeology and the Ancient World

Sample John Cherry, Professor of Archeology and the Ancient World and Classics. Specializations: Changes in material culture on Crete in the 3rd and 2nd millennium, diachronic field survey project on Montserrat in the Caribbean Lesser Antilles.

Classics

Andrew Laird, John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Director of the Program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, Professor of Classics, Professor of Hispanic Studies. Affiliated with the Cogut Institute for Humanities.


Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences

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Scott AnderBois, Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. Specializations: Semantics, pragmatics, Mayan languages. 

Joachim I. Krueger, is a professor of psychology in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences. He specializes in self and social perception as well as strategic interaction. 

Computer Science 

Ernesto R Zaldivar Ernesto R. Zaldivar Adjunct Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science and Deputy Director of Graduate Studies for the Master of Science in Cybersecurity.

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Sample Mark Bertness, Robert P. Brown Professor Emeritus of Biology. Specializations: Conservation Biology in South America.
Sample Stephen Porder, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Environment and Society. Co-Director of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program. Specializations: Ecology, biogeochemistry, geology, rainforests, Brazil. 

Economics

Sample Pedro Dal Bó, Professor of Economics. Specializations: Experimental economic game theory, political economy.
Sample Andrew Foster, Professor of Economics. Director of Population Studies. Specializations: Demography, development, education, empirical microeconomics. 

Education

Sample Daniel Bisaccio, Lecturer in Education. Director of Science Education. Specializations: Biological diversity education in Central and South America. 
Andrea Flores Andrea Flores, Assistant Professor of Education. Specializations: Latinx youth's educational experiences; immigration, citizenship, and social belonging; Latin American migration to the U.S. Southeast
David Rangel, Assistant Professor of Education. Specializations: Latina/os, social inequality, social stratification, immigration, sociology of education.

Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences

Sample Alberto Saal, Associate Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. Specializations: Continents, crustal rock, lunar magma, ocean islands, volcanic rock.  
Picture of Prof. Fischer Karen Fischer, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences. Specialization: the continental lithosphere and its interactions with the deeper mantle, and mantle flow and melting processes in subduction zones.

Hispanic Studies

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Laura Bass, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies. Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture. Chair of Hispanic Studies. Specializations:  Cultural production of early modern Spain and the broader Hispanic world, theater and visual culture, fashion and urbanism, authorship, poetics, and literary canon formation.

Sample Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature. Specializations: Modern and contemporary Latin American and European writing and film, avant-garde aesthetics and poetry, dance, art history, and media studies.
Headshot of Eva Gomez Garcia Eva Gómez García, Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. Specializations: collocations and contrastive linguistics, Spanish language acquisition, and cognitive linguistics.
Adrián Hernández-Acosta, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Specializations: Hispanophone Caribbean literature with a focus on formations of race, gender, and sexuality in the afterlife of racial slavery and under duress of colonial structures.
Sample Jill Kuhnheim, Visiting Professor of Hispanic Studies. Specializations: Spanish American literature, health care, contemporary representations of gender in Latin America. 
Sample Felipe Martinez-Pinzon, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies. Specializations: Latin American literature, Amazon, costumbrismo, romanticism. 
Sample Iris Montero, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies. Specializations: History of science and medicine in the Iberian Atlantic, Mesoamerican visual thinking, colonial Latin American literature
Sample Julio Ortega, Professor of Hispanic Studies. Specializations: Contemporary Latin American novel and poetry, the theory of Latin American literature, especially Mexico and the Andes. 
Sample Nidia Schuhmacher, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. Specializations: Spanish Language.
Sample Silvia Sobral, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies. Specializations: Spanish Language. 
Sample Sarah Thomas, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies. Specializations: Representation of outsider or marginalized subjects, particularly in the context of civil conflict or dictatorship and its aftermath, in Spanish literature and film.
Sample Mercedes Vaquero, Professor of Hispanic Studies. Director of Medieval Studies. Specializations: Medieval Spanish epic, chronicles, ballads, oral tradition, and Spanish philology.
Sample Esther Whitfield, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies. Specializations: Contemporary Latin American literature, Cuban culture, and literature, Caribbean and transatlantic studies.

History

Linford Fisher, Associate Professor of History. Specializations: Cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world, including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude.
Sample James Green, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Director of the Brazil Initiative. Specializations: Modern Brazil, modern Latin America, gender and sexuality in Latin America. 
Sample Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Professor of History. Professor of American Studies. Specializations: Modern Mexico, Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean.
Sample Jennifer Lambe, Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History. Specializations: Mental illness and healing in Cuba, Cuban film.
Sample Jeremy Mumford, Assistant Professor of History. Specializations: Indigenous movements, the Andean region.
Mark Ocegueda, Mellon Gateway Postdoctoral Fellow. Specializations:  Latinx History, Mexican American History, Labor, Race, Ethnicity, Recreation, and Public History.
Sample Amy Remensnyder, Professor of History. Specializations: Cultural and religious history of medieval Europe.
Sample Daniel Rodriguez, Associate Professor of History. Specializations: the history of public health, medicine, and disease in Latin America and the Caribbean.
affiliated faculty gabriel de avilez rocha Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Specializations: the social and environmental history of colonialism and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world.

History of Art and Architecture 

Prof. Itohan Osaiymwese Itohan Osaiymwese, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture.

International Advancement Office

Sample Joshua Taub, Assistant Vice President for International Advancement.

John Carter Brown Library

Sample Neil Safier, Associate Professor of History. Director of John Carter Brown Library.
Vikram Tamboli headshot Vikram Tamboli holds a Ph.D. in History (UW-Madison) and is a Long-Term Fellow of the John Carter Brown Library. At Brown, he will be working on completing a manuscript on the history of trafficking in the Guyanese-Venezuelan borderlands from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the author of “Hustling Fuel, Striking Gold: Smuggling in the Guyanese-Venezuelan Borderlands,” a featured essay in NACLA Report on the Americas (December 2019), and “Black Water Politics: Navigating Oral History, Memory, and Power Along the Rivers of the Guyanese Northwest,” forthcoming in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Additionally, he directs the experimental Healing and Harming Garden Project at the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Gardens at UCLA.

John Hay Library

Sample Patricia Figueroa, Curator of Iberian and Latin American Collections. 
Sample Holly Snyder, Curator of American Historical Collections. Specializations: Anglophone Caribbean, scholarly resources.

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Erica Durante, Visiting Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (2017-20). Specializations: Spanish, Latin American, Italian, and French literature, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era, as well as recent francophone and Hispanophone literature of Africa and the Caribbean.

Literary Arts

Colin Channer, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts. Specializations: Cinema, fiction, interdisciplinary arts, poetry.

Modern Culture and Media

Macarena Gomez-Barris Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on environmental themes and decolonial theory and praxis. She is the author of three books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) which examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarity in troubled times. She is also the author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is working on a new book, Sea Edges (Duke University Press) that considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor Chair, Department of Modern Culture and Media

Music

Joshua Tucker Joshua Tucker, Assistant Professor of Music. Postdoctoral Research Associate. Specializations: Popular music and social change in Latin America.


Political Science

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Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies and Political Science. Specializations: Politics of borders and border controls; politics of transnational crime and crime control; the relationship between transnational crime and conflict. 

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Robert Blair, Joukowsky Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs. Specializations: International intervention and the consolidation of state authority after the civil war, rule of law and security institutions, Colombia. 

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Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs. Specializations: Geopolitics of energy, Venezuela.

Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science. Specializations: comparative political theory and critical race theory, including black political thought, Latin American political thought, political solidarity, and multiculturalism, Afro-descendant and indigenous politics, and multicultural rights in Latin America.

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Richard Snyder, Professor of Political Science. Specializations: Comparative politics and political economy, government, and politics of Latin America, especially Mexico.

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Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, Stanley J. Bernstein '65 P '02 Assistant Professor of Political Science. Specializations: Machine politics in Latin America.

Portuguese and Brazilian Studies

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Onésimo Almeida, Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.  Specializations: Portuguese and Brazilian intellectual history. 

Sample Patricia Sobral, Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Specializations: Portuguese language, Brazilian cinema, Brazilian literature.
Sample Luiz Valente, Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Comparative Literature. Specializations: 19th and 20th-century Brazilian literature and intellectual history, comparative literature, and the literature of the Americas. 
Leila Lehnen, Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Chair of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Specializations: contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature, the intersection between social justice and cultural production. 
Jeremy Lehnen, Associate Professor of Portuguese, Spanish & Latin American Studies, Interim Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Specializations: masculinity and identity formation in contemporary Latin American literature, cinema, and electronic cultural production. 

Public Health

Sample Timothy Empkie, Clinical Associate Professor of Family Medicine. Specializations: Family Medicine in Hispaniola and the Dominican Republic, healthcare in Haiti
Sample Omar Galarraga, Associate Professor of Health Economics. Specializations: Comparative health care systems, statistical analysis of population-level datasets, and global health economics. 
Sample Matthew Mimiaga, Professor of Epidemiology. Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Director for the Institute for Community Health Promotion. Specializations: HIV prevention, mental health, substance use disorders, psychiatric and infectious disease epidemiology, sexual and gender minority health, global health.

Religious Studies

Sample Thomas Lewis, Interim Dean of the Graduate School, Professor of Religious Studies. Specializations: Liberation theology in Latin America.

Sociology

Laura Acosta Laura Acosta is a Postdoctoral Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University. Before joining Brown, Laura taught courses on social inequality, political sociology, and research methods at Trinity College Dublin. Her research brings a historical and comparative perspective to questions of nation formation and the construction and transformation of social identities and symbolic boundaries over time, especially as these processes sustain violence and war. Specialization: Sociology of peace, war, and social conflict, social movements in Mexico and Colombia, sociology of culture, and comparative-historical sociology.
Sample Patrick Heller, Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs. Specializations: Inequality and development, urban transformation, democracy, globalization - Brazil, India, South Africa. 
Sample Paget Henry, Professor of Africana Studies and Sociology. Specializations: Dependency theory, Caribbean political economy, sociology of religion, sociology of art and literature, Africana philosophy and religion, race and ethnic relations, poststructuralism, critical theory. 
Sample José Itzigsohn, Professor of Sociology. Specializations: Sociology of development, labor markets in the Caribbean, social movements in Argentina. 
Sample David Lindstrom, Professor of Sociology. Chair of Sociology. Specializations: Demography, migration, reproductive change, Latin America (Mexico and Guatemala), Africa. 
Sample John Logan, Professor of Sociology. Director of Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences. Specializations: Urban sociology, race, and ethnicity, migration and immigration, family, political sociology. 
Laura Lopez-Sanders, Assistant Professor of Sociology. Specializations: immigration, social inequality, and race and ethnic relations.
Sample Andrew Schrank, Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International Studies. Specializations: Comparative sociology - political, economic, historical.
Sample Leah VanWey, Professor of Sociology. Senior Deputy Director (Research) of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Specializations: Migration and household livelihoods in developing countries, community economic development in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Theatre Arts and Performance Arts

Iván A. Ramos, Assistant Professor of Theater Arts and Performance Studies. Specializations: The links and slippages between transnational Latino/a American aesthetics in relationship to the everydayness of contemporary and historical violence. How the aesthetic provides a way to engage with ethics of difference.
Sample Patricia Ybarra, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. Specializations: Theatre historiography of the Americas, theatre, nationalism, and American identities in North America.

Warren Alpert Medical School

Christian Arbelaez picture
Christian Arbelaez, Vice-Chair of Academic Affairs at the Department of Emergency Medicine and Associate Professor at the Alpert Medical School. Specializations: international emergency care delivery systems and public health and policy with expertise in Latin America
Sample Bruce Becker, Professor of Emergency Medicine. Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Specializations: Smoking cessation, refugee medicine, disaster relief, Nicaragua. 
Sample Joseph Bliss, Associate Professor of Pediatrics. Specializations: Health care in Guatemala. 
Sample Jeffrey Borkan, Professor of Family Medicine. Chair of Family Medicine. Specializations: Doctor-patient communication and narratives, Dominican Republic.
Photo of Dr. Benjamin Brown Benjamin Brown, M.D., is an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Clinician Educator at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He is also an attending physician in the Division of Emergency Obstetrics and Gynecology at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island.

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Suzanne de la Monte, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Professor of Neurosurgery. Specializations: Anatomic pathology, neuropathology, public health. 
Sample Joseph Diaz, Associate Professor of Medicine. Specializations: Dominican Republic exchange program for medical students.
Sample David Egilman, Clinical Professor of Family Medicine. Specializations: Occupational medicine, health, safety in the workplace, and health issues in Latin America, Nicaragua, and Cuba. 
Sample Mark Fagan, Professor of Medicine. Co-Director of the Department of Medicine Dominican Republic Exchange Program. 
Sample Timothy Flanigan, Professor of Medicine. Professor of Health Services - Policy and Practice. Specializations: HIV and Hepatitis infections in underserved communities.
Sample John Foggle, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine. Specializations: Emergency and trauma care, cultural context, Nicaragua. 
Sample Roberta Goldman, Clinical Professor of Family Medicine. Specializations: Mid-life changes among Spanish-speaking Latinas, barriers to care in U.S. Hispanic communities. 
Sample Emily Harrison, Clinical Associate Professor of Family Medicine. Specializations: Health care in Honduras. 
Sample Rami Kantor, Associate Professor of Medicine. Specializations:  HIV treatment monitoring, diversity, molecular epidemiology, the evolution of resistance to antiretroviral drugs.
Sample Michael Lepore, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Services, Policy, and Practice. Specializations: Medicare, Medicaid, and early childhood care. 
Sample Simin Liu, Professor of Epidemiology. Professor of Medicine. Specializations: Pharmacoepidemiology, aging, cardiovascular disease, clinical trials, diabetes, endocrinology, meta-analysis, molecular genetics, nutrition, obesity, sex hormones.
Sample Stephen McGarvey, Professor of Epidemiology. Director of the International Health Institute. Specializations: International health and environmental issues, global health. 
Picture of K. Moretti Katelyn Moretti, Global Emergency Medicine Fellow. Specializations: integration of refugees into the US medical system, access to emergency care in post-conflict Colombia
Sample Amy Nunn, Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences. Assistant Professor of Medicine. Specializations: Generic medicines for HIV in Brazil and other developing countries. 
Sample Pablo Rodriguez, Clinical Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Specializations: Health care in the Dominican Republic. 
Sample Barbara Stonestreet, Professor of Pediatrics. Specializations: Health care in the Dominican Republic. 
Sample Patrick Vivier,  Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence. Associate Professor of Health Services - Policy and Practice. Specializations: Medicaid managed care, childhood obesity, health issues for low-income families, health services research, immunizations, information technology, lead poisoning, preventive services. 

Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs

Sample Andrew Blackadar, Director of Curriculum Development for the Choices Program. Specializations: International topics for high school social studies classrooms, Brazil's transition to democracy.
Claudia Elliott, Associate Director of the International Relations Program. Senior Lecturer in International Studies. Faculty Fellow. Specializations: Theory of democracy and democratization, electoral reform, comparative democratization, political representation, Latin America, Venezuela, Mexico.
Stephen Kinzer, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs. Specializations: American foreign policy, journalism, political science, Latin American regime-change