Center for Latin American Studies, UC Berkeley

Visiting Scholars, 2000-01

Through its Visiting Scholar Program, CLAS provides a temporary home to Latin Americanists from domestic and international institutions. CLAS offers three types of affiliations: Research Associate for visiting faculty, Post-doctoral Fellow for scholars who have received their Ph.D.s within the last two years, and Pre-doctoral Fellow for scholars who are conducting research for their dissertations. Below is a brief background on a few of this year's visiting scholars.

Fall 2000

Fernando Calderón is from Bolivia, where he teaches at two universities in La Paz and is a Human Development Adviser for the United Nations. He has also served as regional adviser in Social Policy for the Economic Commission for Latin America. He holds a doctorate from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and has written19 books, edited 23 and contributed 90 articles published in specialized magazines and journals. This semester he is teaching an undergraduate course entitled "Modernidad e historia en los andes: una mirada introductoria" and a graduate seminar on "Política, cultura y desarrollo: una crítica al neoliberalismo," both in the department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Francisco Dantas is one of Brazil's most celebrated novelists, author of Coivara da Memória, Os Desvalidos, and Cartilha do Silencio. He holds a doctorate in Luso-Brazilian literature and currently teaches at the Federal University in Sergipe. This semester he is a visiting professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, where he is teaching an undergraduate survey of Brazilian literature and an upper-division course on the literature of the Brazilian northeast.

María Esther Epele is a medical anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the National University of La Plata in Argentina, where she is a faculty member in the Natural Sciences School and Museum. She is currently doing an ethnographic study of Latinos with AIDS in the Mission District of San Francisco, within the context of drug abuse. She is also researching gender relationships and street culture in this realm. Her previous work focused on terminally ill AIDS and cancer patients in Argentina and included the papers "Lógica causal y (auto) cuidado. Paradojas en el control médico del VIH-SIDA" (1997) and "Institución médica y subjetividad. Poder y saber en la construcción de la terminalidad en oncología" (1997). Epele has a postdoctoral grant from CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas). She will be affiliated with CLAS through December 1999 and with the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology for the next two years.

Mynor Melgar is a Guatemalan lawyer and a visiting scholar at CLAS in 2000. He has led the prosecution of a number of prominent human rights cases, including those of assassinated anthropologist Myrna Mack, the massacre at Dos Erres, and the murder of Bishop Juan José Gerardi following the church's release of its human rights report. He will be holding a public talk, "Human Rights Challenges in Contemporary Latin America," at CLAS on March 9th.

Luis Mirón, a native of Guatemala, is visiting the Department of Social and Cultural Studies in the Graduate School of Education this year. Professor Mirón holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from Tulane, where he focused in his dissertation on Costa Rican educational planning. He has been conducting comparative educational research for approximately 12 years. Among other things, at Berkeley he will be teaching a graduate seminar entitled "Social and Cultural Critiques of Education."

Gerardo Munck joins the faculty in the Department of Political Science this semester. Currently an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Munck specializes in comparative politics and democratization in Latin America, and is the author of Authoritarianism and Democratization: Soldiers and Workers in Argentina, 1976-83. He is interested in qualitative methodologies and game theory, and has conducted extensive field research in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

Raquel Olea, visiting professor in the Spanish and Portuguese department, comes to us from Santiago, Chile, where she currently directs the program on education and culture at the La Morada Center for Women1s Development. She holds a doctorate in literature from the W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and has published several books on topics related to feminism, gender, and literature. She is also a member of the academic council at the Universidad de Chile1s Program on Gender and Culture, and has recently received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to work on the reconfiguration of masculine and feminine identities in esthetic and social languages of the Chilean transition.

Alejandra Pellicer originally hails from Mexico, where she works in the Department of Educational Investigations (DIE) of the Center for Research and Advanced Study of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV-IPN). Her current research explores psycholinguistic aspects of literacy among indigenous Maya children in Yucatán, focusing on the ways children who are taught to read and write in Spanish then develop their own conceptual strategies for reading and writing in the Maya language using the Latin alphabet. She has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level at UNAM, the National Pedagogical University, the Iberoamerican University, and the Autonomous University of Querétaro. Prof. Pellicer will be a visiting professor in the School of Education for the 2000-2001 academic year.

Sandy Tolan is a visiting fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism. His class, "Reporting the Border," will bring students to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for hands-on reporting focusing on the environment, trade, and development. Tolan has reported along the border for National Public Radio, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He has also done extensive reporting in other regions, including Central and South America, the Dominican Republic, India, the Balkans and the Middle East. His independent production company, Homelands Productions, is at work on "Border Stories," an extensive documentary series for public radio.

Spring 2001

Enrique Dussel Peters is a professor of economics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM) and a consultant for the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). He was a member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (SNI) from 1997 to 2000, and is the author of numerous articles and books on the political economy of Mexico, social effects of economic change, and Nafta. Recent books include Polarizing Mexico. The Impact of Liberalization Strategy (2000); El Tratado de Libre Comercio de Norteamérica y el desempeño de la economía en México (2000); and Changes in Industrial Organization of the Mexican Automobile Industry by Economic Liberalization (1997, with Clemente Ruiz Durán and Taeko Taniura). He will be at CLAS during April 2001, teaching a graduate seminar entitled "The Political Economy of Mexico in Transition" and giving a public lecture, "Economic Challenges of the New Fox Administration in Mexico."

Jaime Montes received his Ph.D. from La Universidad Complutense, Madrid, in 1986. He is a co-director of the LAS Master's program at the Universidad de la Serena in Chile and director of the Interdisciplinary Center of Latin American Studies. With Dr. Noemí, Dr. Montes will be visiting CLAS to participate in Center activities and establish means for inter-institutional collaboration. Dr. Montes, a philosopher, wishes to conduct a study on "intercultural philosophy," using research in the United States and elsewhere, to establish norms of dialogue among contemporary societies.

Cristián Noemí received his Ph.D. from La Universidad Complutense, Madrid, in 1996. Dr. Noemí, a linguist, is dean of humanities at Universidad de la Serena in Chile, and co-director of the LAS Master's program at the university. His current research focuses on dominant discourse in Latin American society, and resulting global interactions in political, social, and economic realms.

Bernardo Ricupero is a Research Associate at CLAS. He will be doing research related to his dissertation, which focuses on the effort of establishing Nations by the romantic generation in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Mr. Ricupero received his M.A. in Political Science in 1997 from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and is currently working toward his Ph.D. in the same field. He will be affiliated with CLAS through June 2001.