Affiliated Programs and Fields of Discipline

Graduate Student Activities | Graduate Students | Related Resources

Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt
Latin American and Caribbean History

Vanderbilt University has one of the oldest programs in Latin American studies in the United States.  Our doctoral program focuses on developing scholars and teachers with both a broad knowledge of Latin American and Caribbean history and intensive training in research and writing in their specialty.  Doctoral students normally do five semesters of classes, then take their general exams at the beginning of their sixth semester.  Working closely with our eight historians of Latin America and the Caribbean, students develop a dissertation topic and prospectus during their fifth and sixth semesters. 

From their first semester, we encourage our doctoral students to become actively engaged in the profession through field research, networking, publishing, collaborative projects, and grant applications.  Our students have presented their research at numerous national and international conferences including the American Historical Association, Conference on Latin American History, Latin American Studies Association, Brazilian Studies Association, and the Southern Historical Association.  Over the last decade our students have won many prestigious internal and external research awards (including four Fulbright awards).

Since 1989, nineteen students have entered our doctoral program.  Ten have completed their dissertations, and nine are currently in the program.  The average time to completion of dissertation has been 6 years.  Close individual supervision of our students has been key to the timely and successful progress of our students.

Vanderbilt University has a distinguished tradition in Latin American and Caribbean history beginning with the hiring of Alexander Marchant (and four other Brazil specialists) and the creation of an Institute of Brazilian Studies in 1947.  Among other noted historians of Latin America who have taught at Vanderbilt are Simon Collier, Robert Gilmore, J. León Helguera, and Barbara Weinstein. 

Current faculty include: Richard Blackett (19th-century British Caribbean), Celso Castilho (19th-century Brazil), Marshall Eakin (19th/20th-century Brazil), James Epstein (19th-century Caribbean), Peter James Hudson (20th-century Caribbean Diaspora), Jane Landers (Iberian Atlantic world); Frank Robinson (20th-century Panama), Edward Wright-Rios (19th/20th-century Mexico).

Current Graduate Students

Caree Banton, 3rd year, Caribbean and African Diaspora
Courtney Campbell, 2nd year, 20th-century Brazil
Joanna Elrick, 4th year, race and slavery, Brazil and Cuba
Pablo Gómez, 5th year, African Culture and History of Medicine, 17th-century Spanish Caribbean
David LaFevor, 6th year, race, sports, identity, 20th-century Cuba and Mexico
Miriam Martin, 2nd year, colonial Guatemala
Angela Sutton, 3rd year, piracy, 17th-century Caribbean
Nicolette Wilhide, 3rd year, race relations, social mobility, 19th/20th-century Brazil
Erin Woodruff, 2nd year, indigenous history, 16th-century Spanish Caribbean

Recent Graduates

Wheat, David (2009) “The Afro-Portuguese Maritime World and the Foundations of Spanish Caribbean Society, 1570-1640”
Assistant Professor, Michigan State University

Berger, Eugene (2006) “Permanent War on Peru's Periphery: Frontier Identity and the Politics of Conflict in 17th Century Chile”
Assistant Professor, Southern Missouri State University

Story, Emily (2006) “Constructing Development:  Brasília and the Making of Modern Brazil”
Assistant Professor, Salisbury University
                       
Robinson, Barry (2005) “The Limits of Loyalty in Colotlán: Subversion, Pardon, and Society in Late Colonial New Spain, 1780-1821”
Assistant Professor, Samford University

Williford, Tom (2005) “Armando los Espíritus: Political Rhetoric in Colombia on the Eve of La Violencia, 1930-1945”
Assistant Professor, Southwest Minnesota State University
                       
Breuer, Kim (2004) “Reshaping the Cosmos: Maya Society on the Yucatecan Frontier”
Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Texas, Arlington

Guitar, Lynne (1998) “Cultural Genesis: Relationships among Indians, Africans and Spaniards in Rural Hispaniola, First Half of the Sixteenth Century”
Director, Council on International Educational Exchange, Dominican Republic

King, John (1998) “Cooperation or Conflict?:  Relations between Chile and the United States during the 1960s”
Director of Social Studies, Ransom Everglades School, Coconut Grove, Florida

Ford, Talisman (1995) “Passion Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Sexuality as Seen by Brazilian Sexologists, 1900-1940”
Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Corse, Theron (1995) “Projecting Peron: The Constructed Image of Juan Peron, 1945-1949”
Associate Professor, Tennessee State University

Related Resources

Center for Latin America Studies
Latin American Collection, Vanderbilt University Library
Brazilian Studies Association, Secretariat 
Program in African American and Diaspora Studies
Department of Anthropology
Department of Spanish & Portuguese

Latin American and Atlantic World Graduate Student Activities
Summer 2009

Joanna Elrick won her second Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grant from the Center for Latin American Studies to attend study intensive Portuguese at the ACBEO institute in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. While in Salvador, she met with the director of the Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais and conducted preliminary research in the municipal archives. Joanna will deliver a paper entitled, “Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre:  the Invention of an Afro-Cuban Marian Tradition', at the 2008 Association for Cultural Studies Conference at University of the West Indies, in Kingston, Jamaica.

Pablo Gómez is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History at Vanderbilt University where he received his Master’s degree in History in 2006. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Pablo worked as a Postdoctoral fellow in Genetics and Oncology at the University of Iowa in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery. He got his medical degree at the Instituto de Ciencias de la Salud in Medellin, Colombia, and his degree in Orthopedic Surgery at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. Pablo has been the recipient, amongst others, of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies-Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a British Library Major Research Grant, a John Carter Brown Library- Paul W. McQuillen Memorial Research Fellowship, the Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr. Prize for Best Graduate Paper of the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association, a research grant from the program for Cultural Cooperation between the Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States, and fellowships and grants from the Center for the Americas, the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture, and the Center for Latin-American and Iberian Studies, as well as from the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University. His work has been published in the edited volume “Differenz und Herrschaft in den Amerikas: Repräsentationen des Anderen in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” the Encyclopedia of Plagues, Pestilence, and Epidemics and in several medical journals. His present research interests involve African and European healing and diseasing practices and ideas about bodies, health, disease and death in the early modern Caribbean, West Africa and Latin America, and more generally in the Iberian Atlantic. Pablo is the director of the British Library funded project "Creating a digital archive of Afro-Colombian history and culture: Black Ecclesiastical and Notarial records from the Choco, Colombia" also a member of the NEH funded project “Ecclesiastical Sources and Historical research on the African Diaspora in Brazil, Cuba and Colombia.” He has presented his work as a historian in meetings of the AHA, the Society for Historical Archaeology, the Southern Historical Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, LASA, and in conferences in Toronto (Canada), Glasgow (Scotland), Manchester (UK), Berlin, Bogota, and at several universities in the United States including UCLA, The University of Chicago, The University of Texas at Austin, and The University of Connecticut. He is a member of LASA, the Conference on Latin America History, the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association, the Society for the Social History of Medicine and the American Association for the History of Medicine. Currently he is working, under the supervision of Prof. Jane Landers, on his dissertation project “Bodies of Encounter: African and Afro-descendant Health and Death Practices and Ideas in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean.” Pablo can be reached at pablo.f.gomez@vanderbilt.edu .

David LaFevor is currently completing his dissertation: “The Virile Sport and the Modern Man: National Identity, Masculinity, and Boxing in Cuba and Mexico:  1876-1930.”  This transnational history draws on research in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, the United States, Brazil, and Peru.  It engages his interest in national identity, gender, modernity and transnational cultures in modern Latin America.  David has been a recipient of numerous fellowships and research grants including the Fulbright Fellowship for Mexico; the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for research in Great Britain, Spain, Turkey, Russia, and Peru; the Center for Latin America and Iberian Studies Summer Research Grant; Binkley/Weaver Grant; and most recently the Leon Helguera Fellowship for dissertation writing.  In addition to his work at Vanderbilt he has held academic affiliation with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and the Universidad de La Habana.  He has presented his research at conferences in Europe, Latin America, and the United States and has been a member of paleographical preservation teams in Cuba and Colombia.  He will be submitting two articles for publication during academic year 2009-2010, and will defend his dissertation in May of 2010.

Angela Sutton has completed a 17th-century Dutch language course with the Nederlandse Taalunie at Columbia University with funding from both the Vanderbilt History department and the Max Kade center. She is currently using 17th century Dutch, German and English-language sources to investigate piracy’s effect on the Atlantic slave trade in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.  Angela has presented on piracy and the slave trade at Northeastern University’s Global Connections conference in 2009, and has a forthcoming article in Darkmatter Journal later this year.

Nicolette Wilhide is a third year graduate student in Latin American History, with a focus on Modern Brazil. Her current research centers on the Post-Emancipation period (late 19th and early 20th century). Specifically, she is interested in the ways in which former slaves and their descendants navigated their post-abolition role in society. Within this, she focuses on the development of modern Brazilian race relations, class and social mobility, as well as issues of education, professionalization and delinquency. Nicolette has presented work on Brazilian representations of race in print media at “Crisis and Recovery in the Americas” through the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) in New Orleans. She will be giving a paper at the Graduate Association of African American History (GAAAH) conference in Memphis based on research gathered during the summer of 2009 from the APERJ, the AN, AGCRJ and the Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright ©2007 Vanderbilt University