Affiliated Faculty

• Samuel England: Medieval Spanish translation of Middle Eastern texts; Iberian lyric.

• Laura Schechter: Development Economics; Behavioral Economics; and Contract Theory.

• Isabelle C. Druc: Cultural Anthropology; Ethnography; Archaeology; Ceramic Production; and Ethnoarchaeology.
• Karen Strier: Biological Anthropology; Primate Social Behavior; Primate Ecology; and Conservation.
• Armando Muyolema: Latin American Literature and Culture; Indigenous Movements in the Andean Region; and Indigenous Insurgency.
• Sarah Clayton: Mesoamerican Archeology, Nahuatl.
• Jerome Camal: Global Music/ Caribbean/African diaspora, principally music of the French Antilles.
• Falina Enriquez: Cultural anthropology, Ethnomusicology, Brazil.
• Jessica Hurley: Yucatec Mayan Language

• Jim Escalante: Photography; Book Art; and Graphic Design.
• Douglas Rosenberg: Video, Installation, and 2D Art; Screendance.
• Henry Drewal: History of African and African Diaspora Art.
• Jill Casid: Visual Culture Studies; Colonial Botanical transplants and the Caribbean.

• Eve Emshwiller: Ethnobotany; Domestication and Evolution of Crop Plants; and Conservation of Genetic Diversity of Crops.
• Ken Keefover-Ring: “I study the biogeography of plant secondary chemistry. Plants produce a huge variety of secondary compounds that serve many functions, such as attracting pollinators or deterring herbivores. Even within a single plant species, however, these compounds can vary and these plant-animal interactions can be altered across the landscape.”

• Lori DiPrete Brown: global health, particularly the health and well-being of women and children in highly vulnerable situations around the world.

• Carolina S. Sarmiento: Development, governance, and Cultural Spaces.

• Sara L Mckinnon:  intercultural rhetoric, globalization/transnational studies, legal rhetoric, and transnational feminist theory. Most of her projects bridge rhetoric and qualitative/ethnographic research methods, but she is also interested in using performance-based methods to do and represent research.

• Samer Alatout: Environmental policy and politics/Water politics in the Middle East/Environmental politics on the US-Mexico and Palestine-Israel borders/International Development and the politics of sustainability.
• Randy Stoecker: Community Organizing and Development; Community-Based Research; and Community Informatics

• Mary Beth Collins: Mary Beth is the Executive Director of the UW-Madison Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, where she leads the Center’s strategic plan, teams, and programming, and develops and delivers courses for undergraduate, graduate, and special students. She has experience as a teacher, attorney, and nonprofit professional.  An alumna of LACIS (dual degree JD/MA), and a former visiting law student at la Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, she continues to explore key issues in the nonprofit/nongovernmental sector, community-based efforts, and civil society with Latin American collaborators.

• Stephen Quintana: Ethnic issues in development, counseling, and education Ethnic perspective-taking ability in children Integration of developmental and counseling theory.

• Margaret Hawkins: Bilingual Education; Languages and Literacies domestically and abroad, Asia, Africa, Central and South America
• Katie Kirchgasler: Curriculum Studies; Cultural Studies of Science Education and Public Health; Histories of Science and Health Interventions in Segregated and Colonial Schooling.
• Mariana Pacheco: Bilingualism and biliteracy processes, bilingual/language education policy and practice, and Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x (im)migrant students’ schooling experiences.
• Thomas Popkewitz: Curriculum History and Studies; Cultural Sociology of School Reform/Change; Professionalization/Teacher Education; and Historical Sociology of Education Sciences.
• Diego Roman: Bilingual/Bicultural education. His research interests are located at the intersection of linguistics, science education, and environmental studies.
• François Victor Tochon: Bilingual Education; International Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Teacher Education; and World Language Education.
• Kate Vieira: Social history of literacy, transnational migration, the materiality of literacy, qualitative research methodologies, multilingual writing, Latino/a Studies.

• Victor Cabrera: Dairy Farm Cost-Efficiency and Profitability; Dairy Farm Production Systems; and Environmental Stewardship.
• Michel Wattiaux: Ruminant Nutrition; Nutrient Management Systems; World Dairy Operations.

• Chris Walker: Caribbean Dance. Spoken word/First Wave; the fusion of Caribbean dance and contemporary styles using the traditional stage, alternate spaces, and multimedia as a medium.

• Carolyn Kallenborn: Mexican Art and Culture; Conceptual Garments and Sculptures.

• Frank Fernandez: Organizational theory and education finance, as well as higher education’s potential for promoting the public good through three strands of research (equity issues related to knowledge production, how higher educaiton influences and reflects larger social and political forces, and equity consequences of policies and initiatives on diverse faculty and student groups).
• Lesley Bartlett: International and Cooperative Education; Cultural Politics of Literacy in Brazil.
• Nancy Kendall: Comparative ethnographic research on global development education policies and their intersections with children’s and families’ daily lives.
• Diana Rodríguez Gómez: State-building and education policy-making processes in areas affected by violence, particularly in Latin America; State formation and fragility near the Colombia-Venezuela border. Rodríguez-Gómez also oversees EPS’s Study Abroad program in Colombia, where students learn how human rights are exercised, negotiated, and contested in Colombia’s educational system.

• Paul Block: Methods, models, and tools for managing climate variability and change; hydrologic forecasting and integration into decision model; addressing water quality and quantity extremes; hydro-economics and policy mechanisms; risk, reliability, and uncertainty; sustainable approaches.
• Steven P Loheide: Hydroecology/ecohydrology, hydrogeology, river restoration, remote sensing, hydrologic consequences of climate change, vegetative water use/vegetation patterning, sustainable land-use practices, stream-aquifer interactions, ecosystem function/services, human interaction with aquatic ecosystems.
• Tim Osswald: Polymer engineering including modeling and simulation in polymer processing, engineering design with plastics, sustainability, and biopolymers.

• Jesse Lee Kercheval: Writing poetry in English and Spanish. Writing fiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Additional interests include translation and Uruguayan poetry: Circe Maia, Tatiana Oroño, Agustín Lucas among others.
• Christa Olson: 19th and 20th-century visual cultures in the Americas; historical methods and methodological pedagogy; publics, democracy, nationalism, & transnationalism; coloniality and post-colonialism.
• Oscar Ivan Useche: Dr. Useche is a lecturer in the English Department. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and advanced degrees in Latin American and peninsular literatures and cultures. His teaching and research interests include the influence of science, technology, and industry on Spanish cultural production, and the relations between dynamics of social, political, and economic transformation and the construction of national identity in Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• Sarah Ann Wells: Modernism and the avant-garde; science fiction, labor, translation, film, and media history.

• Adrian Treves: ecology, law, and human dimensions of ecosystems in which crop and livestock ownership overlap the habitat of large carnivores from coyotes up to grizzly bears.
• Lisa Rausch: agricultural expansion and the cultural, social, and institutional factors that promote or inhibit conservation-positive behaviors among agricultural actors.

• Ruth Goldstein: “I am broadly interested in the gendered aspects of human and nonhuman health, a quickly heating planet and environmental racism.  My current book project Life in Traffic: Women, Plants, and Gold Along the Interoceanic Highway examines the socio-environmental consequences of transnational infrastructure projects and climate change along Latin America’s recently constructed thoroughfare, La Interoceánica, with a particular focus on intersections of race and indigeneity, cis and trans women’s health and “earth” rights in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. My subsequent research on mercury as a global pollutant, analyzes the racialized weight of toxic body burdens and impacts on maternal/fetal health.”

• Aurora Santiago Ortiz: “My research focuses on antiracist feminisms, decolonial perspectives, and participatory action research. My work has been published in the Michigan Journal for Community Service Learning, Curriculum Inquiry and Chicana/Latina Studies Journal, among others. I have also contributed to Society and Space, NACLA, The Abusable Past blog of the Radical History Review, Electric Marronage, Open Democracy, and Zora magazine. My current book manuscript entitled Circuits of Self-Determination: Mapping Solidarities and Radical Pedagogies in Puerto Rico focuses on the rhizomatic nature of the political cultures that embody decolonial futures through antiracist, decolonial feminist, and mutual aid projects in the present. It also examines how these protest repertoires and political cultures are part of the afterlives of the student movement in Puerto Rico.”

• Erika Marín-Spiotta: how anthropogenic and climatically-driven landscape disturbance alters the accumulation and loss of biomass and biologically active elements within and across ecosystem boundaries.
• Sarah Moore: Geographies of waste; space and social theory (including Marxian, post-structural psychoanalytic and legal approaches); urban geography; and environmental justice.
• Holly Gibbs: tropical land-use change and globalization, particularly on the potential to reconcile food security, climate change, and conservation goals.
• Almita Miranda: Race/ethnicity, gender, neoliberalism, (im)migration, citizenship, transnationalism, borders/boundaries, social movements, mixed-status families, political and cultural geographies; Latinx ethnography; U.S., Mexico
• Lisa Naughton-Treves: Biodiversity conservation in developing countries; Social conflict and land use around protected areas; Land tenure & property rights; Attitudes toward wildlife; Wildlife conservation in human-dominated landscapes; Tropical Africa; Tropical South America.

• Pablo Gomez: History of Medicine and Science in Latin America; History of Medicine and Science and the African Diaspora; Early modern corporeal epistemologies: Race and Medicine.
• Marcella Hayes: I am a historian of Latin America and early modern Iberia, with an emphasis on the Andes. I study how black people shaped early modern Iberian political life, using their ideas of community and methods of self-governance to rethink early modern concepts of belonging. In my research and teaching, I focus on inclusion and exclusion, political claims-making, and the development of categories of identity.
• Elizabeth Hennessy:  the intersection of environmental history, political ecology, science and technology studies.
• Patrick Iber: politics of culture and intellectuals, socialism and democracy, poverty and inequality, cultural diplomacy and imperialism, and the added value of transnational approaches to history.
• Jorell A. Melendez-Badillo: Historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. My work focuses on the global circulation for radical ideas from the standpoint of working-class intellectual communities.
• Brenda Plummer:  Afro-American,  20th century U.S., race, and history of foreign relations.  My Research and Teaching Interests: Afro-American History; History of U.S. Foreign Relations. Current research: Afro-Americans and U.S. foreign affairs; race and gender in the Cold War era.
• James Sweet: Africans and their descendants in the broader world.

• Claudia Calderón: tropical horticulture, sustainability, cropping systems, climate change, food security, global health, nutrition, and traditional medicine.

Catherine Woodward: Tropical Ecology and Conservation. Interrelationships between land use, water quality, and human health.

• Beatriz L. Botero: specialist in contemporary Latin American literature and cultural studies / Narrative and psychoanalysis, with special emphasis on identity, body and social conflict. She has also worked these topics in relation to contemporary visual art.

• Hernando Rojas: Political communication, in particular examining: (a) the deployment of new communication technologies for social mobilization in a variety of contexts; (b) the influence of audience perceptions of media (and audience perceptions of media effects) on both public opinion and the structure of the public sphere; and (c) the conditions under which media support democratic governance.

• Alexandra Huneeus: human rights law, with emphasis on Latin America. Her work stands at the intersection of law, political science, and sociology.
• Erin Barbato: Erin M. Barbato is the Director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She teaches second and third year law students to represent individuals in removal proceedings and with humanitarian-based immigration relief. The work often involves representing people seeking refuge in the United States.

• David Gaus: Healthcare in Rural Latin America; Family Medicine, and Tropical Medicine.
• David Kiefer: Family Medicine, Latin American ethnobotany and evidence-based herbal medicine.

• Javier Calderón: Classical Guitar; and Music of Latin America and Spain.

• Lucas Richert: My primary research interests rest in the histories of intoxicants and pharmaceuticals. The various substances that I have examined include: cannabis, ketamine, heroin, laetrile, and many others. In my second book Strange Trips, for example, I examined how American and Canadian patients would travel to Mexico or source various drugs from Mexico. More recently, in Cannabis: Global Histories, I worked with different authors (Isaac Campos and Jose Domingo Schievinini) to incorporate their analyses of Mexican and Latin American cannabis use into a wider transnational framework.
  I also have an interest in building the history of drug studies and amplifying voices from Latin America and beyond.

Jeff Hartman, PT, DPT, MPH: Assistant professor, Doctor of Physical Therapy, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health | “My work in Central America began as a MPH student here at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health back in 2005. I performed a district-wide needs assessment for disability and rehabilitation in the southern Toledo district of Belize. This work was in part sponsored by LACIS and was instrumental in the development of a community-based rehabilitation program that still continues to this day. My career has navigated the globe, but it recently brought me back to Belize as a Fulbright Scholar during the spring semester of 2020. My research explored and mapped the provision of rehabilitation services throughout the country of Belize and has contributed to a greater vision cast through the North American and Caribbean Region (NACR) of the World Confederation of Physical Therapy (WCPT) and the Pan American Health Organization. The Fulbright Scholar experience allowed me to expand the advocacy work I have been part of over the years from the district to the national level. I continue to serve in a variety of capacities with organizations based in Belize.”

• Edna Ledesma: Urban design; Latinos; U.S.-Mexico border; place; markets
• Alfonso Morales: Urban social theory, law, food systems, economic development.
• Maria Moreno: Maria Moreno, a cultural anthropologist by training, is Associate for Experiential Education with the Undergraduate Certificate in Global Health (GHI) program and as the Multicultural Outreach Manager for the Earth Partnership (EP) program. At GHI, she is part of the undergraduate certificate team to develop curriculum and courses, document impact, and help manage the program. At EP, she develops curricular materials and outreach programs centered on ecological restoration for youth, college students, community members and professional development for teachers. She also designs and teaches field course as well as supervising domestic and international internships on environmental education. She leads Earth Partnership Global Initiatives in Mexico, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Puerto Rico.

• Soeren Henn: Comparative politics, Political Economy, and Development Economics with a specific focus on Mexican politics and the Dominican Republic.
• Erica Simmons: Civic Society, Globalization, Human Rights, Latin America, Methodology, Revolution, Social Movements.
• Benjamin Marquez: Political sociology and American politics. Cause Lawyers, Immigration, Identity, Latinos, Mexican Americans, Philanthropy, Race, Social Movements, Texas.
• Jon Pevehouse: Democratization, Foreign Policy, Human Rights, International Agreements, International Institution, International Trade, Political Economy.
• Jonathan Renshon: Psychology of judgment and decision-making in foreign policy, and more broadly, in international security and experimental methods.
• Eduardo Schmidt Passos: Post-doctoral fellow with the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy. Schmidt-Passos’ research focuses on theology, religion and politics, contemporary political theory, and Latin American political thought.

• Jonathan Patz: Environmental health effects of climate change, multisectoral solutions for global health.
• Leonelo Bautista: Cardiovascular diseases, particularly in the identification of risk factors for hypertension and barriers for hypertension control. His current etiologic work is centered on the independent and joint roles of stress hormones, sex hormones, and immune response markers on the development of cardiometabolic risk factors.

Sainath Suryanarayanan: Transdisciplinary research regarding decline in bee populations in the U.S. and internationally; Regional research in Argentina, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, and Spain.

Armando Ibarra: Chicano/a Latino/a working communities, adult education on issues of diversity in the workplace, international labor migration, leadership development, organizing workplaces, and applied research.

• Patrick Barrett: U.S./Latin American Relations, El Salvador.
• Katie Jensen: Race, political sociology, and forced migration in the Americas, with a focus on Brazil.
• Jenna Nobles: how people make decisions about migration and fertility and the implications of these decisions for population change. Her current projects include the links between residential change and crime, anticipatory migration behavior, demographic responses to the diffusion of health risks, and the reconstruction of hidden population traits.
• Gay Seidman: Political Sociology, Economic Change and Development, Class Analysis and Historical Change, Demography and Ecology, Social Movements and Collective Behavior.

• Mercedes Alcalá-Galán: Early modern Spanish literature, gender studies, poetics
• Grant Armstrong: Morphology, syntax, and semantics of Spanish. He also works on Yucatec Maya, a Mayan language spoken in the Yucatán peninsula. His research interests within Mayan linguistics include Split Ergativity, Grammatical Function Changing Morphology, the Morphology of Root Classes, Non-Verbal Predicates and Comparative Approaches to Spanish and Mayan Verb Semantics and Morphology.
• Katarzyna Beilin: The Iberian Peninsula and Latin America with a focus on environmental issues, alternative economies, time and memory, and indigenous epistemologies. Together with other Environmental Humanities scholars, she has launched an Environmental Cultural Studies platform that has produced interdisciplinary research.
• Ksenija Bilbija: Cultural studies, gender criticism, and post-traumatic memory, with interest in Spanish American Literatures. Ksenija’s research broadly looks at how cultural memory and memorialization work within neoliberal society.
• Glen Close: Transatlantic Dynamics of Twentieth-Century Spanish American Narrative.
• Guillermina De Ferrari: Caribbean literature and art, Cuban literature and visual culture, the Caribbean novel, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, world literature.
• Victor Goldgel-Carballo: 18th and  19th-Century Latin American Literature, Visual Culture, Media History, and Comparative Race and Ethnicity.
• Paola Hernández: Contemporary Latin American theatre, performance, and Latinx Studies.
• David Hildner: Renaissance / Baroque drama and poetry of Spain, Luso-Brazilian literature before 1800, philosophy and literature, religion and literature, advanced language practice.
• Steve Hutchinson: Early modern Spain, the Mediterranean, and Africa.
• Luis Madureira: Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, Modernism and Modernity in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, Early modern and colonial studies, Theatre and performance in Africa.
• Ruben Medina: Mexican and US Latinx literature and culture, continental connections, film studies, Neo-Avant-Garde movements, and Mexican migration to the United States.
• Sarli Mercado:  lyrical landscapes in poetic and visual art expressions by Latin American artists linking urban and non-urban environments to ecological thinking. This project is also tied to the study of literary/artistic representation and production and the proliferation of traumatic memory sites in urban spaces in Latin America in dialogue with the “Global South.” Included in her research are topics related to contemporary Southern Cone poets and the literary practices of twenty-first century Spanish American writers.
• Marcelo Pellegrini: 19th and 20th Century Latin American Poetry; the Latin American Essay; and Translation Theory.
• Rajiv Rao: Intonational Phonology; Prosodic Phonology; Optimality Theory; Phonetic and Phonological Variation; Second Language Acquisition; and Afro-Hispanic Phonetics and Phonology.
• Kathryn Sánchez: 19th and 20th Century Luso-Brazilian Narrative; Visual Culture and Gender Studies; and Contemporary Women Writers.
• Ellen Sapega: 20th Century Portuguese Literature and Culture.
• Catherine Stafford: Linguistics; Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy; and Phonetics.
• Fernando Tejedo-Herrero: Socio-historical approaches to language, including morphosyntactic changes from Latin to Romance and standardization processes in Early Modern Spanish.

• Alejandra Quintos: Dr. Quintos is an Assistant Professor and a Nellie McKay Fellow. Her research interests include problems in probability, stochastic processes, and statistics motivated by their applications, particularly in mathematical finance and more specifically in credit risk theory.

• Vishala Parmasad: Vishala Parmasad is a health services research scientist with methodological expertise in qualitative research methodologies and implementation science. She works on surgical outcomes research currently. Vishala has inter-disciplinary interests in medical and cultural anthropology, with geographic focus on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean and the Indian indentured diaspora. She has previously performed research into infectious disease prevention and control, and anthropological research into type 2 diabetes self-management, blood donation, and traditional tattooing practices.

Jorge Osorio: Pathobiological Sciences; viruses and zoonotic pathogens.

Jessica Hite: Pathobiological Sciences: Host-pathogen evolution and co-evolution; Nutritional immunology; Quantitative modeling of infectious disease dynamics

Warren Porter: Bioinformatics, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Evolution. Climate and Disease/Low-Level Toxicants in Reptiles and Mammals.