Latin American and Caribbean History
MSU’s History Department has a flourishing program in Latin American and Caribbean History which builds on decades of tradition. The program has had a succession of internationally recognized scholars who laid the foundation of this tradition: David C. Bailey, Charles C. Cumberland, Leslie B. Rout, David W. Walker and Laurent Dubois all produced superior scholarship and trained graduate students over the second half of the twentieth century.
The faculty currently engaged in the program has grown steadily over the past few years and includes prize winning researchers and instructors. Peter M. Beattie’s research focuses on the interaction between state institutions and the poor (both free and enslaved) in Brazil from 1850 to 1950. His cases studies in Brazilian history engage broader debates on state building, masculinity, race, national identity, sexuality, the body, and penology. Benjamin T. Smith’s research centers on the post-Revolutionary relationship between the state, religion, and indigenous movements in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. He is particularly interested in how Catholicism became a central part of indigenous identity and political mobilization to resist the growing power of a secular state in centered in Mexico City, and his new project examines the formation of popular urban social movements in the 1940s and 1950s. Erica M. Windler’s research focuses on childhood amidst the world’s largest nineteenth century urban slave population: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She examines how slavery, gender, age cohort, class, and race influenced the treatment and education of children from humble backgrounds in this fascinating tropical city.
Our Latin America and Caribbean field is supported by professors hired in fields outside the region, but whose research and teaching contribute to Latin American history. Our three professors of Chicano/Latino History were all originally trained in Mexican history. Dionicio (Dennis) Valdes began his scholarly career as a colonial Mexicanist, but he has also published extensively on Chicanos in the American Midwest with a focus on twentieth century labor history. Javier Pescador also began his career as a colonial Mexicanist; he even co-authored a text book on the subject. His research ranges from transatlantic colonial identities to contemporary Mexican American religious practice and sports. Jerry Garcia wrote his dissertation on Asian immigrants in Mexican society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but he also works on contemporary Mexican American leisure activities such as cock fighting. Finally, one of our historians of Africa, Walter Hawthorne published a book on the supply of slaves for the international market in the Portuguese colony of Guinea Bissau, but he is currently at work on research on the slave trade from Guinea to northern Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Our students also benefit from the expertise of top ranked scholars in other fields of history: African, Comparative Black, Atlantic, Migration and World History. Moreover, MSU has more than 140 faculty affiliated with its center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Students are encouraged to work with highly respected Latin Americanist and Caribbeanist scholars in other related disciplines such as Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, Agricultural Economics, and Political Science.
In addition to support from the History Department, students of Latin American and Caribbean history can compete for additional support for their research from other MSU units. The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) currently holds a grant from the Tinker Foundation that funds some ten summer pre-dissertation research trips. The Center for the Advanced Study of International Development (CASID) has Foreign Language Areas Studies (FLAS) fellowships that fund the study of less commonly taught languages. International Studies and Programs (ISP) offers ten $5,000.00 grants that fund pre-dissertation research in the international arena. In addition the College of Social Science and the Council of Graduate Students offer support for conference travel, dissertation research, and dissertation write up. Competitive fellowships are also available to graduate applicants as well as funding targeted to support students from underrepresented groups.
MSU's support of Latin American and Caribbean Studies is manifested in a number of vital areas. The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies is a Title VI funded area studies center that provides a venue to encourage interdisciplinary teaching and research on the region. CLACS sponsors a speaker series that brings top scholars to campus to share their research findings and enliven the campus community with arts and music of Latin America. Our Latin American bibliographer Mary Jo Zeter works to build our library holdings in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Matrix, MSU’s award winning humanities and technology center works with CLACS on projects to preserve Latin American images, documentation, and data. The department of Spanish and Portuguese support the study of the two most spoken languages of the region, and tutors are contracted through CLACS to teach less commonly taught languages in the region, such as Haitian Kreyol.
Our graduate program, though relatively small in terms of the number of students, has had great success in placing our graduates in competitive academic posts in recent years. The small number of graduate students in the field is a benefit to our students who can look forward to working closely with their professors.
Recent PhDs:
Eric D. Duke (PhD 2006) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of South Florida. He teaches courses on African American, Caribbean, and Black Diaspora History, as well as courses on Black Radicalism and Blackness in the Americas. Eric specializes in twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean, African American, and Black Diaspora History, with particular focus on the overlapping and interconnected histories of these areas. His research interests include: Race and Nation-Building/Nationalism, Race and Identity Construction, Decolonization, Black Internationalism, and Intra-racial Relations.
Edward "Eduardo" Paulino (PhD 2001) is an assistant professor in the Department of History at CUNY/John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. His research interests include state formation, violence, historical memory and ideology in the construction and legacy of national identity. He teaches courses on world history, genocide, borders, and ethnic conflict.
Chantalle F. Verna (PhD 2005) is assistant professor of U.S. foreign relations with Latin America and the Caribbean in the departments of History and International Relations at Florida International University (Miami, FL). Her recent courses include Modern American Civilization, Inter-American Relations, Dynamics of Contemporary International Relations, and Haiti-U.S. Relations. Her current research activities include preparing a book manuscript based on her 2005 doctoral dissertation entitled “Haiti’s ‘Second Independence’ and the Promise of Pan-American Cooperation, 1934-56.”Current Graduate Students:
Carlos Aleman is a fifth year graduate student whose dissertation project will focus on Nicaraguan migration to the U.S. from the Sandinista Revolution to contemporary times. He intends to provide a transnational analysis on the experience of Nicaraguan immigration, examining issues of labor, race, and gender as well as how U.S. and Nicaraguan policy has affected the lives of Nicaraguan immigrants. He received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in History and Latin-American/Latino Studies in 2002.
David Carletta is from Rochester, New York and holds a master’s degree in history from Sonoma State University (Rohnert Park, California) and a master’s degree in international affairs from Ohio University (Athens, Ohio). His main research interest is US—Latin American relations. Currently, he is writing up his dissertation on Francis Grant, an American activist for women’s rights and democracy in Latin America during the Interwar and Cold War eras. He uses her life as a lens to examine how gender, nongovernmental organizations, and center left politics shaped the evolution of US and Latin American relations in the mid-twentieth century. After defending his PhD, Mr. Carletta plans to attend seminary with the goal of becoming an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church.
Lindsey Gish is a third year graduate student in the History Department. She plans to become an Atlantic historian by studying the voluntary and forced migration of people across/within the Atlantic Ocean in the 18th and 19th century. Her primary area of focus is the Caribbean, specifically Haiti, before and during the Revolution era. Her most recent research looks at the formation of identity and citizenship among free colored people in the Colony of Saint-Domingue and Louisiana before and during the Haitian Revolution.
Alberto Nickerson is a fourth-year graduate student whose research in 19th Century Nicaragua explores how popular classes understood and the liberal reforms of José Santos Zelaya. Specifically, he explores how and why popular classes accepted, rejected, or modified various liberal policies.
Sonia Robles is a third year graduate student whose dissertation will focus on urbanization and the role of women and Protestantism in a Mexico City neighborhood from the end of the Porfiriato through the Mexican Revolution and into the 1950s. Her dissertation will speak to broader debates on urbanization, women and Protestantism.
Andrea Christine Vicente received her M.A. in Latin American History from Florida State University in 2004. She is currently in her second year as a doctoral student in the Latin American History program. Her dissertation research will focus on the social, cultural and political aspects of gender in colonial urban Mexico. Currently she is working on a manuscript tentatively entitled, "Women of the City: Widowhood in 19th Century Guadalajara, Mexico" to be submitted for publication with The Americas.