Director, Faculty, and Staff

Patsy Lewis

Interim Director
Visiting Professor of International and Public Affairs

Patsy Lewis is Professor of Regional Integration and Small States Development at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is currently a Visiting Professor and Faculty Fellow of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University and Director of the Development Studies Program. She is a graduate of Cambridge University (Mphil, PhD.) and the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (BA). Professor Lewis will hold office hours on Wednesdays from 2:00 to 3:00 pm at the Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street, Room 218.

• +1 401 863 6429
• patsy_lewis@brown.edu

Erica Durante

Director of Undergraduate Studies
Visiting Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Erica Durante is a visiting Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. She has held the position of tenured associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Louvain (Belgium). Her research has focused on Italian, French, Spanish and Latin American literature, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era, and on contemporary francophone and hispanophone literature of Africa and the Caribbean. She has published extensively in comparative literature, genetic criticism and Global Studies. Funded by the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, she has compiled the edition of Borges’ personal library in the precious Borges’ archive in Buenos Aires. She is the author of the books Mallarmé et moi (Pisa: ETS, 1999) and Questions de poétique et d’écriture: Dante au miroir de Valéry et de Borges (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), and she has edited Los Meridianos de la Globalización (Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2015) and Le Double: littérature, arts, cinéma. Nouvelles approaches (with A. Dehoux) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018). Her current research focuses on literature and globalization and she is completing a new monograph titled Destination Global: Air Travel in Contemporary Film and Fiction. Erica's Fall 2019 office hours will be Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. To make an appointment with Erica, click here.

• erica_durante@brown.edu

Kate Goldman

Center Manager

Kate Goldman holds a B.A. in Political Science and Modern Languages from Union College and an M.A. in Spanish American Literature from Rutgers University. Prior to joining CLACS, she worked as a translator, editor and teacher in the United States and Chile. She is on the board of the Cultural Organization for the Arts, a non-profit that brings arts programs to public schools and volunteers as an interpreter for asylum seekers through the CARA Pro Bono Project and other organizations.

• 401-863-2645
• katherine_goldman@brown.edu

Ailton Barbosa

Outreach Coordinator

Ailton Barbosa holds a B.A. in Political Science from Rhode Island College (RIC) and an M.A. in International Relations and Chinese Politics from Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Prior to joining CLACS, Ailton had long international career as an educator, teaching in China, Cape Verde Island and finally the US. He is an active member of his community and is a member of the Cape Verdean-American Community Development and a board member of the Institute for Portuguese Lusophone Studies at RIC.  

• ailton_barbosa@brown.edu

Ally Zhu

Student Assistant

Ally Zhu is a first-year undergraduate student at Brown, where she is studying English, Computer Science, and Business, Entrepreneurship and Organizations. While she currently lives in Hong Kong, Ally grew up in Shanghai, where she spent a lot of time critiquing cafes and pondering contemporary issues on her blog, Allywaytalk. Creating art has played a major part of her life since the very beginning when Ally started off in traditional mediums like pencil, acrylic, charcoal and clay, and later transitioned to experimenting in digital forms such as photography, video and graphic art. As someone extremely excited about the entrepreneurial process, she spent a summer interning at an ecommerce startup, Baopals, and later built her first startup, SAshare, which is an online platform that facilitates the exchange of exemplar student work. Outside of work, her interests include fencing, basketballing, attending Hackathons, and playing the piano and clarinet.

• ally_zhu@brown.edu