People

Previous Visiting Faculty

2022-2023

	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.
	Luis Martin Valdiviezo Arista - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor Luis Martin Valdiviezo Arista earned his Bachelor in Humanities and License in Philosophy at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He holds an EdD in Social Justice Education and an MEd in International Education from UMass-Amherst. Using intercultural, decolonial, and critical education approaches, Valdiviezo's research focuses on ethnicity, gender, social class, and formal education in Perú and Latin American societies. Curently, Valdiviezo is a professor of Philosophy of Education, Ethics & Anthropology of Education, and Ethics in the Humanities, all at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). He is also a researcher of the International Network of Intercultural Studies-PUCP (RIDEI-PUCP). In 2020-2021, he was the Custer Visiting Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University. Valdiviezo has worked as a consultant for the Peruvian Ministry of Education and Ministry of Culture on topics including intercultural education, cultural policies, and Afro-Peruvian studies. His most recent book is titled, Educación, Negritud e Interculturalidad: Ensayos en tiempos de neoliberalismo, pandemia y bicentenario en el Perú (2021). Valdiviezo has also published book chapters and articles in academic journals in Latin America and Europe on the educational situation of Afro Descendants and Indigenous Peruvians. He has written three novels and numerous short stories, some of which have obtained recognition in national and international contests. He comes from a Peruvian family with Afro-descendant, Amazonian, Andean and Hispanic roots.
	Catherine Whittaker is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Previously, she was a postdoc at UCSD, the LMU Munich in Germany, and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. At Brown, she is working on two projects: 1) a grant proposal focusing on militarized masculinities among marginalized Latinos in Southern California; 2) a book on the paradoxical interconnectedness of love and violence, expanding the arguments from her 2022 article, “Beyond the Dead Zone: The Meanings of Loving Violence in Highland Mexico” (American Anthropologist). Her research is driven by the desire to humanize misunderstood populations, such as survivors and perpetrators of violence, by uncovering the narratives and structures that shape their circumstances.
2020-2021
	Kristen Kolenz - Postdoctoral Fellow, Mellon Sawyer Seminar: Rethinking the Dynamic Interplay of Migration, Race, and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and Latin America (AY 2021-2022) Email: kristen_kolenz@brown.edu Kristen A. Kolenz earned her MA and PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University and her BA in philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her research focuses on resistance to state violence, Central American social movements, migration, and the transformative potential of everyday practices through the lens of decolonial and transnational feminisms. She is currently working on her book manuscript, an analysis of the transnational movements and community-building practices of Central Americans subjected to forced migration, dangerous crossing conditions, and confinement. In the study, Dr. Kolenz takes an interdisciplinary methodological approach that combines ethnographic methods, her own activist practice, and performance studies. The project bridges the fields of Latin American and Latinx Studies, bringing together research conducted in Guatemala, the Sonoran Desert, and immigrant justice movements in the US. The project’s goal is to document the transformative possibilities that emerge from Central Americans’ everyday practices of coping with loss, distance, and violence and to theorize transnational belonging in resistance to white supremacy.
	Lucila Nejamkis - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Fall 2021) Lucila Nejamkis. PhD in Social Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her PhD thesis analysed inmigration policies in Argentina and Mercosur. She also holds a M.A. in Political Action and Citizen Participation (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos y Colegio de Abogados de Madrid, Madrid-Spain). BA in Sociology (U.B.A). Ex-PhD fellow of Conicet, and Ex-MA fellow of Community of Madrid. Current Researcher of the Technological and Scientific Research National Council (CONICET). Associate Researcher at IDAES (National University of San Martin, UNSAM) where she co-directs a migration studies center. She is also an Associate Professor at Arturo Jauretche National University. She has published numerous academic papers and chapters in books and has participated in several migration research projects dealing with a variety of subjects such as public policies, state, nationality, citizenship, and human rights in Argentina and MERCOSUR. Since 2019, co-director of the action-research “Socio-environmental strategies of women migrant workers in the Reconquista River Basin”, Buenos Aires Argentina) financed by the International Development Research Council (IDRC), Canada.
2020-2021
	María Inclán - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (2020-2021)
	Kamala Kempadoo - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Spring 2020/ returning in the Fall of 2022) 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.
2019-2020
	María A. Cabrera Arús - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (2019-2020)
	Estavao Rafael Fernandes - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (2019-2020)
	Iria Puyosa - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (2019-2020)
2018-2019
	Irma Velasquez Nimatuj - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (2018-2019)
	Daina Sanchez - Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-2019)
	Jean Segata - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Fall 2018)
2017-2018
	Vera Paiva - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Fall 2017)
	Cecilia Rocha - UNSAM Exchange Participant (Fall 2017)
	Ramiro Segura - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Spring 2018)
	Lucas Gonzalez - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Spring 2018)
	Vicente Lecuna - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Spring 2018)

2016-2017

	Jimena Ponce de León - Sarmiento Research Fellow (Fall 2016)
	Daniel Party – Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Spring 2017)
	Florencia Malbrán - Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor (Spring 2017)
	Guillermo Wilde - Sarmiento Research Fellow (Spring 2017)

2015-2016

	Verónica Zubillaga - Universidad Simón Bolívar (Venezuela)
	Marcelo Leiras - Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina)
	Jacqueline Behrend - Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina)
	Lucas Christel - Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina)
	Juan Pablo Luna - Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
	Ricardo Lagos Escobar - Former President of Chile

2014-2015

	Maritza Paredes - Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
	José Carlos Orihuela - Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
	Verónica Pérez - Universidad de Buenos Aires
	Lucas González - Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina)
	Álvaro Fernández Bravo - Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina)