Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
CLACS

Director, Faculty and Instructors, and Staff

Director

Neil Safier

Director
Associate Professor of History

Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University and currently serves as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He also maintains affiliations with the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008; paperback edition, 2012; Spanish translation, 2016) and Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2023, co-edited with Joan-Pau Rubiés). From 2013 to 2021, he served as Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library.

Faculty and Instructors

Erica Durante

Director of Undergraduate Studies
Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies

Erica Durante is Associate Professor of Hispanic 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 European and Latin American literature, on literature and globalization, and on francophone writers of Africa and the Caribbean. 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 "Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People" (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), "Questions de poétique et d’écriture: Dante au miroir de Valéry et de Borges" (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), and "Mallarmé et moi" (Pisa: ETS, 1999). 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), and has published numerous articles in the fields of Comparative Literature and Global Studies.  Fall 2023 office hours will take place on Zoom and by appointment. To make an appointment for office hours, click here. To join office hours online, use this Zoom link.