Helena Alviar Garcia

My name is Helena Alviar, I am a Colombian legal scholar, currently a full professor at Sciences Po Law School, in Paris. I used to be a professor at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. After the Tinker Visiting Professorship, I went on to be the director of the Master’s as well as the Doctorate Program and later the Dean of Los Andes law school, the best law school in Colombia and the 5th one in Latin America.

Being a Tinker Visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison radically changed my academic career. It was the first time I had the luxury to solely teach and research (as a Third World scholar, I always had administrative duties along with teaching and research). Because of this intellectual space, that was so generously provided by the Tinker Foundation, my publishing career really took off. I can confidently say, that being the Dean of the law school and being offered a job in Paris, were a direct consequence of my visit to Wisconsin. In addition, as a product of my visit I co-edited a book, Law in the New Developmental State: the Brazilian Experience in Latin American Context, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.