Director, Faculty, and Staff

Jessaca Leinaweaver

Director
Professor of Anthropology

Jessaca Leinaweaver is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research in Peru and the Peruvian diaspora. Her first book, The Circulation of Children (Duke University Press, 2008), based on research carried out in Ayacucho, Peru, examined informal child fostering in the urban Andes and its intersections with international adoption policies. Her second book, Adoptive Migration (Duke University Press, 2013), based on research carried out in Madrid, Spain, contrasted transnational adoption and family migration from Peru to Spain. She has also done collaborative research in Yauyos, Peru, with colleagues and students at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima. Her current project is a study of aging, social responsibility, and demographic thinking in Peru, examining the marginalization of older, impoverished Latin Americans and the effectiveness of government proposals for improving their conditions. 

• +1 401 863 6429
• jessaca_leinaweaver@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. To make an appointment with Erica, click here.

• erica_durante@brown.edu

Jeremy Lehnen

Director of Graduate Programs

Jeremy Lehnen is a Visiting Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brown University.  His primary research interests broach questions of gender and sexuality, particularly masculinities, representations of violence, Latin American horror film, and the interface between cinema and contemporary Latin American society.  

• jeremy_lehnen@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

Kat Chavez

Student Assistant

Kat Chavez is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Brown, where she studies Art History (with a focus on Latin American/Latinx art) and Visual Art (with a focus on printmaking). A native of Los Angeles, California, she has worked at various arts institutions in the city, including the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Box Gallery Los Angeles, and the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) Gallery as part of the Getty Center's Multicultural Undergraduate Internship Program, where she did research for their upcoming exhibition on Argentinian artist León Ferrari. Most recently, she worked as an artists' assistant for the SOY Artista program at Self-Help Graphics and Art in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, a historic community arts space founded during the Chicano Movement. She has been involved with the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), was a Co-Chair for the student organization Better World x Design, and has assisted with youth arts classes at the local organization ¡CityArts!  

• katherine_chavez1@brown.edu

Jackson Sales

Student Assistant

Jackson is a junior concentrating in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Development Studies. Jackson grew up in Mexico and on a self-sustaining farm in a rural part of Costa Rica, and studied in India before attending Brown. At Brown he has focused on economics, entrepreneurship and design with a focus on Latin America. Outside of academics Jackson has worked with the Dean of the College to create an advising program for sophomores; is a founding member of Van Wickle Ventures, Brown’s first venture capital fund; and works as  a monitor in the Brown Design Workshop. He  has worked for Aflore, an innovative micro finance company based in Bogota; Burro Ghana, a design firm focused on improving the livelihoods of small holder farmers in rural Ghana; and Farmer Willies, an alcoholic ginger beer company started by two of his close friends. Jackson has also spent time blacksmithing in Mexico and building exhibition pieces for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

• jackson_sales@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