Visiting Faculty

Sebastián Antezana Quiroga is the International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, with an affiliation with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He received a Ph.D. in romance studies from Cornell University in 2019 and worked as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Dickinson College and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. His book project, “Migrant Afterlives: Spectral Narratives of Greater Mexico and Greater Bolivia,” focuses on migrant communities in contemporary literature and film from the Mexican and Bolivian cultural spectrums, on the ways in which these communities are strategically associated with specters and other afterlife figures, and on how this association reflects the disjointing, spectral logic of different variants of the national model (like the transnational, the multinational, and the postnational) that operate in unison. He has published several academic articles and book chapters and is the author of three books of fiction. In Fall 2025 he will begin the tenure-track position of Assistant Professor of Spanish at Xavier University.

Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the political ecology of forest conservation, historical geography, post-statist geographies, the epistemology of geography, and participatory cartography. He has worked with Indigenous Chatino people and campesino communities in Oaxaca, México, regarding local knowledge and understanding of their landscape through their language. Also, he worked with communities on the effects of forest conservation and management programs on land commons, forest commodification, and social differences among these communities. At Brown, he is working on a 1) collaborative feature documentary on carbon offsetting projects in the Chatino region and community members’ links to the forest, 2) co-writing with community members a paper exploring the consequences of environmental conservation over land and forest commons in the community and 3) working with the Hay Special Collections Library to implement the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials.

Agustín Díez Fischer received his Ph.D. in Art History and Theory in 2017 from the Department of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where he teaches Latin American Art. He has curated various exhibitions, among them The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War along with Ruth Estévez and Miguel López for the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. He is director of the Centro de Estudios Espigas (Espigas Research Center) in Buenos Aires, an archive focused on Argentinean art that is part of the Escuela de Arte y Patrimonio at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) and affiliated with the Espigas Foundation. Díez Fischer has received many grants and fellowships, including the Terra Foundation Travel Grant, the Program in Latin American Studies Visiting Research Scholar, and Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University.

Kamala Kempadoo, of Guyana/Barbados, is a sociologist and Professor Emerita of Social Science at York University, Canada. Her expertise includes Caribbean, Black and transnational feminisms, Black Radical Thought, and sex worker and critical antitrafficking studies. She has published extensively on the Caribbean sex trade and global anti-trafficking discourses.  Most recently she is the co-editor, with Halimah A. F. DeShong, of the collection Methodologies in Caribbean Research on Gender and Sexuality and with Brown professor, Elena Shih, of White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking.  She was the Cogut Visiting Professor at CLACS for spring 2021 and is again visiting in Fall 2023 semester.

Professor Kempadoo served as director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University and temporarily as head of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. She is the recipient of various awards, including the Distinguished Scientific Award of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Studies Association.

Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the political ecology of forest conservation, historical geography, post-statist geographies, the epistemology of geography, and participatory cartography. He has worked with Indigenous Chatino people and campesino communities in Oaxaca, México, regarding local knowledge and understanding of their landscape through their language. Also, he worked with communities on the effects of forest conservation and management programs on land commons, forest commodification, and social differences among these communities. At Brown, he is working on a 1) collaborative feature documentary on carbon offsetting projects in the Chatino region and community members’ links to the forest, 2) co-writing with community members a paper exploring the consequences of environmental conservation over land and forest commons in the community and 3) working with the Hay Special Collections Library to implement the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials.

Haroldo Dilla Alfonso is a historian and sociologist, Doctor in Science from the Federal Polytechnic Institute of Lausanne, Switzerland. At present, he is a tenured professor and director of the Institute of International Studies (INTE) of the Arturo Prat University, Chile. He has been a researcher / visiting professor at Rutgers, Harvard, Puerto Rico, Hannover and FLACSO-Mexico universities. Between 2015 and 2018 he directed the research on the Tacna-Arica cross-border region on the Chilean / Peruvian border (Fondecyt 1150812) and currently directs the Fondecyt 1190133 on urban port intermediation in Arica. His most recent books are La frontera dominico-haitiana (The Dominican- Haitian border) (Editorial Manatí, Santo Domingo, 2010), La migración haitiana en el Caribe  (Haitian migration in the Caribbean) (Centro Bonó, Santo Domingo, 2013), Ciudades en el Caribe: un estudio comparado de La Habana, San Juan y Santo Domingo  (Cities in the Caribbean: a comparative study of Havana, San Juan and Santo Domingo) (FLACSO, Mexico, 2014), La vuelta de todo eso: economía y sociedad en el complejo urbano transfronterizo Tacna/Arica (The return of all that: economy and society in the Tacna / Arica cross-border urban complex) (RIL, Santiago de Chile, 2019) and Donde el pedernal choca con el acero: Hacia una teoría de las fronteras latinoamericanas (Where flint collides with steel: Towards a theory of Latin American borders) (RIL, Santiago de Chile).

José Miguel Nieto Olivar

José Miguel Nieto Olivar is an assistant professor at the School of Public Health of the University of São Paulo (Brazil). He is responsible for courses on Anthropology of Health, Body, and Society, Social Studies of Science, and Research Methodology. Dr. Nieto Olivar was born in Bogotá, Colombia, where he studied Social Communication and obtained his MA in Latin-American Literature. In his home country, he worked with and around human rights, sexual and reproductive rights, and gender in the context of the internal armed conflict. In 2010, he obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil. His doctoral dissertation was an ethnography on the political creation and enacting of Brazilian sex workers seen from the perspective of their affective, sexual, marital, and labor trajectories. In 2013, it was published as the book “Devir Puta” [The Wore Becoming].
 
Between 2010 and 2017, Dr. Nieto Olivar was a researcher at the Center for Gender Studies PAGU, at the State University of Campinas (Brazil), conducting anthropological research with intersectional perspectives about gender, sexuality, money, violence, mobilities, the borderland, and the State. Fieldwork took place in the cities of Tabatinga and São Gabriel da Cachoeira, both situated in the northwestern Brazilian Amazon, in the transborder complex with Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Based on the relationships established with the Brazilian movement of sex workers and also with Amazonian border cities, he is currently developing a long-term research project on experimentations of struggle and care in critical contexts, in dialogue with black poetics and feminisms, transfeminisms, putafeminisms, decolonial feminisms, indigenous knowledge, and the discussions on "cosmopolitics" and the "end-of-the-world". This project takes a pluri-epistemological approach that seeks to nurture a creative dialogue in the intersecting spaces between anthropology, public health, and the arts, and serves as a framework for the work that he will develop at CLACS/Brown University in 2023.