Letter From Our Interim Director

September 6, 2024

Dear CLACS Community,

 Hi -- my name is Parker VanValkenburgh, and it's my pleasure to be able to spend academic year 2024-25 as Interim Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, while Neil Safier is on leave. I'm a faculty member in the department of Anthropology at Brown whose research focuses primarily on the long-term impacts of Spanish colonialism on Andean Indigenous people, as well as environmental and political history in South America more broadly. I'm an archaeologist by training, but my work crosscuts archival, archaeological, and digital methods, and the most important year of my training was perhaps the one that I spent earning an MA in Latin American Studies at the University of London in 2004-05.

Back then, little more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, area studies were in the midst of a decline, and it seemed like most of the anthropologists I met at conferences wanted to study transnationalism in one way or another. In my MA program, however, I was surrounded by transformative conversations and perspectives that arose from my mentors' deep regional expertise and dedication. I entered my Ph.D. program the following year convinced that my own work needed to be grounded in such commitments. While paradigms have shifted in the last two decades and transnational research remains important, I continue to believe that regionally-focused work like the scholarship we support at CLACS is critical to the university's mission. Comparative and synthetic work that crosscuts regions is only ever as strong as the local knowledge that it draws on. And as both academic projects and universities seek to work more collaboratively––that is, to carry out research with, rather than simply for or about its subjects––our understanding of local histories, languages, and institutions is as vital as ever.

As the rest of this newsletter outlines, we have an exciting year ahead of us in CLACS, and I want to take this opportunity to provide a bit of an overview of it. In addition to afternoon lectures, book release events, concerts, and film screenings––not to mention Cafecito con CLACS!––we are hosting a biweekly research seminar entitled Coloquio CLACS on Wednesdays at lunch time. Each month, one Coloquio will feature faculty research and the other will focus on student research. Lunch will be served at both! In addition, to guide our programming for the term, many of our events will be linked to our annual theme––Indigenous People and Ecologies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Of course, we are also working on programming beyond that theme and would be enthusiastic to discuss opportunities for partnering with you if you have events for which our support could be helpful.

I would like to thank to Center Manager Maria Isabel Marin and Events and Outreach Coordinator Alizah Holstein, who are both entering their second years guiding the center's activities and without whom CLACS would be scarcely more than a name. This year, we're also truly fortunate to also be welcoming Dr. Daniel Rodriguez, Associate Professor in Brown's Department of History, as the new Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACA) concentration. Dr. Rodriguez is an historian of Cuba, Latin America, and US empire, whose new research looks at the lives of children on the margins of Cuban society after the formal end of slavery. His own teaching focuses on Latin American history, the history of medicine, film, gender and sexuality, and, starting this semester, on the history of incarceration in the Americas. We also welcome Daiana Rivas-Tello, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology, who will be teaching the LACA capstone course (LACA 1900), Benjamin Salinas, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology who will be CLACS's Interdisciplinary Opportunities Fellow and will be taking the lead in organizing Coloquio CLACS's student-focused events.

Finally, I want to extend a special welcome to three Cogut Visiting Professors who will be joining us this year, Dr. Deborah Delgado Pugley, Dr. Jamille Pinheiro Dias, and Dr. Camilo Umaña Hernández. Dr. Delgado Pugley, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú, in Lima, is a sociologist whose work focuses on environmental governance and climate Policy, particularly regarding Indigenous peoples and tropical forests. We're very fortunate that she will be with us for the full academic year. In the fall, she is teaching LACA 1504P: The Amazon, Climate Change, and Conservation. Dr. Dias is a scholar of language, art, and literature and the Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILSC) at the University of London's School for Advanced Studies who will be joining CLACS for the fall semester. She will be co-teaching LACA 1601Y/POBS 1601Y: Indigenous Arts and Activism in Brazil, with Prof. Leila Lehnen. In the spring, we will then be joined by Dr. Camilo Umaña Hernández, a scholar of criminology who is also currently the Deputy Minister of Justice of Colombia, who will be teaching a class on drug policy in Latin America. We will have the privilege of hearing about these scholars’ research during Coloquio, and I hope you will join me in welcoming them and reaching out them.

As you settle into the semester, please come by and say hi to us at 59 Charlesfield Street to have a coffee -- or reach out over email. We're all truly looking forward to connecting with you soon!

With best wishes for the start of term and the academic year ahead, 

Parker VanValkenburgh