Director, Faculty and Instructors, 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. To make an appointment please click here. 

• +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

Nicolas Campisi

Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies

Nicolas Campisi is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Studies from Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina. He holds a B.A. in Art History and Hispanic Studies from Washington College. His current interests include 20th and 21th Century Southern Cone narratives, avant-garde poetics, travel literature, trauma and memory studies, Judaic Studies, and world literature. He is also interested in Latin American soccer fiction, and he has co-edited an anthology of soccer short stories (Por amor a la pelota: Once cracks de la ficción futbolera) published by Editorial Cuarto Propio in Chile.

• nicolas_campisi@brown.edu

Daniel McDonald

Ph.D. candidate in History

Daniel McDonald is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department. He has a B.A. in History and Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as an A.M. in Latin American History from Brown University. His research interests are in modern Latin American history, which focuses on twentieth-century Brazil, urban history, social movements, consumption, and democratization in South America. His MA thesis examined the intersections of race and space in the construction of the planned city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais during Brazil’s Old Republic (1889-1930). His dissertation project examines the ways in which everyday citizens and civil society contested the political economy of the Brazilian state during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) and in the first decade of democracy. Dan McDonald's office hours are Wednesday from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

• daniel_l_mcdonald@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

Adriana Rodriguez

Student Assistant

Adriana Rodriguez is a junior concentrating in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Political Science from Teaneck, New Jersey. Her decision to concentrate in LACA arose from her interest in studying her own Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage - specifically the history of U.S. intervention and imperialism on the two islands, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean more broadly. This year, Adriana is looking to begin her thesis, in which she will study the relationship between political activism and the practice of cultural traditions between diaspora Puerto Ricans in the United States and those on the island. She would like to understand the questions of how diaspora and islander Puerto Ricans take ownership of their “Puerto-ricanness,”  if diaspora Puerto Ricans have a responsibility to participate in political action related to the island if they partake in cultural traditions and if diaspora organizing effective/desired/needed? Adriana is active at Brown with the Center for Students of Color, as co-President of Dominican Students @ Brown. She also participated in the Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad program in Havana, Cuba during the fall semester of 2019 and loves (can’t stop) talking about her experiences there!

• adriana_rodriguez@brown.edu

Andrea Vega Troncoso

Student Assistant

Andrea is a senior concentrating in Latin American & Caribbean Studies and Environmental Studies. She grew up in Santo Domingo, República Dominicana and has been involved in political and environmental work back home. At Brown, she serves as senior advisor for Dominican Students at Brown, where she helps organize cultural events, performance series, and workshops. She is currently working on her honors thesis, "¿Paraíso pa quién? The political ecology of tourism and environmental injustice in coastal communities of the Eastern Dominican Republic," for which she conducted ethnographic fieldwork as a Voss Fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES). She is interested in the questions: what is at stake in producing paradise, and for whom is paradise constructed? She is also part of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, a fellowship for students of color that focuses on diversity and justice within the environmental field. In her free time, Andrea enjoys cooking vegan versions of Dominican food and having really long WhatsApp calls with her family. 

• andrea_vega@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