Dr. Sean Burges
Sean W. Burges holds a Ph.D. in Politics & International Studies from the University of Warwick, England. He is currently an Adjunct Professor with the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. His research interests focus on Brazilian foreign policy, inter-American affairs and emerging market countries (BRICs) in world affairs, with special reference to trade and foreign aid. He is the author of Brazilian Foreign Policy After the Cold War (University Press of Florida, 2009), and has published on Brazil, inter-American affairs and democratization in International Relations, Third World Quarterly, The Bulletin of Latin American Research, The Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Canadian Foreign Policy, International Journal, and The Cambridge Review of International Affairs as well as in edited volumes with Johns Hopkins University Press and Palgrave Macmillan. His news and editorial contributions have been made to Swiss National Radio, the BBC World Service, The National Post, Miami Herald, Journal of Commerce, Financial Post, Washington Post, Washington Times, Maclean’s, Brazil Magazine, FOCAL Point and Military Review. Burges is currently working on the tension between the OECD member countries and BRIC countries in the new international economic and aid governance order as well as an extended research project on the state-business nexus in contemporary Brazilian development policy.
Dr. W. John Green
Dr. W. John Green, formerly a biweekly columnist for Colombia Week, is a historian of modern Latin America specialized in the interrelated questions of democracy, problems of governance, popular participation in political institutions, human rights and social justice, and finally, media coverage of the region. In the spirit of COHA, he is devoted to finding ways to expand U.S. public interest regarding these issues.
After receiving a BA from Baylor University in 1986 with majors in History and Spanish, he went on to earn an MA in Latin American Studies in 1989, and a PhD in Latin American History in 1994, both from the University of Texas at Austin. He has spent considerable time in Colombia as an AFS exchange student in Cali and as a Fulbright Fellow, as well as serving as a visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional. He has also lived and traveled throughout Latin America over a period of twenty-nine years, from Mexico to the Southern Cone, as a researcher, occasional journalist and observant tourist.
He has published widely on Latin American history in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Latin American Research Review, The Americas, Historia Crítica, the Anuario Colombiano de la Historia Social y de la Cultura, as well as contributing to other journals and collections in Colombia, the United States, and Germany. He is the author of Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in Colombia (Gainesville: The University Press of Florida, 2003), a study that explores the dynamics of popular political mobilization, agency, and hegemony in Colombia from the 1920s to the 1950s. The editors of CHOICE MAGAZINE named it an “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2003.
He is currently completing a book on political murder in modern Latin America, for which he has a book contract with the University Press of Florida. The study explores how the widespread assassination of popular leaders and activists has proliferated into the wholesale slaughter of so called “subversives.” It examines the “dirty wars” in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico, as well as the ongoing process in Colombia.
During the spring semester of 2010 he will be a fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) in Charlottesville, Virginia
Chris McGillion
Chris McGillion is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication, and currently directs Journalism Studies, at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia. He is a former senior journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald.
He has written extensively on Latin America and U.S. foreign policy for a variety of newspapers, magazines and journals in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. He is the co-author of Unfinished Business: America and Cuba After the Cold War, 1989-2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Cuba, the United States, and the Post-Cold War World (University Press of Florida, 2005).
Dr. Morris Morley
Morris Morley is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. A specialist on United States-Latin American Relations, he is the author of Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952-1986 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Washington, Somoza and the Sandinistas: State and Regime in U.S. Policy toward Nicaragua, 1969-1981 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994; and the co-author of U.S. Hegemony Under Siege: Class, Politics and Development in Latin America (London: Verso, 1990), Latin America in the Time of Cholera: Electoral Politics, Market Economics, and Permanent Crisis (New York: Routledge, 1992) and Unfinished Business: America and Cuba After the Cold War, 1989-2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Mr. Morley is the co-editor of Cuba, the United States and the Post-Cold War World: The International Dimensions of the Washington-Havana Relationship. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005
GeorgeAnn Potter
GeorgeAnn Potter is a US trained economic anthropologist who grew up in Bolivia and returned there over a dozen years ago to work with the social movements, especially women peasants in the Chapare and now nationally with the country-wide Co-Federation of Peasant Women “Bartolina Sisa.” She works closely with the Bartolina’s executive director and president. For the last five years George Ann has also led mostly US human rights groups to Bolivia in association with Global Exchange , the Taskforce on the Americas and independent groups for “Northerners” interested to know the true Bolivian reality. Every year George Ann also sponsors interns from around the world (US, Canada, Europe and even India) who likewise want to share their skills while learnng about Bolivian social movements.
Dr. Richard Alan White
Dr. White received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Latin American History from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he held Woodrow Wilson and Fulbright-Hyes scholarships. While conducting historical research in Paraguay on an Organization of American States post-doctoral fellowship, he worked as a field representative for Amnesty International.
He has taught at UCLA and California State University, Los Angeles, as well as the Universidad Catolica and the Universidad Nacional in Asuncion, Paraguay. White is the only non-Paraguayan member of the Instituto de Investigaciones Historicas Dr. Jose Gaspar Rodrigues de Francia, an honor awarded in recognition of the Spanish publication of his book Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution, 1810—1840.
As a Project Director in the International Relations Division of the Mexico City based Centro de Estudios Economicos y Sociales del Tercer Mundo (CEESTEM) during the 1980′s, White’s responsibilities including producing a semi-annual report analyzing the diplomatic, political, and military developments in Central America, conducting on site investigations of human rights violations, and briefing U.S. Congressional delegations on fact-finding missions to the region. His work, The Morass: United States Intervention in Central America, received the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States award.
He has worked as a as a consultant on Latin American affairs for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the CBS Evening News and ABC World News. He has also recently published Breaking Silence: The Case that changed the Face of Human Rights (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004).
Dr. Holger Henke
Holger Henke is Assistant Provost at York College (CUNY) and current President (2010-2011) of the Caribbean Studies Association. His teaching and research interests include various aspects of international relations, (international) political economy, migration, “race” relations and (political) culture. A fellow of Harvard’s Salzburg Seminar and Senior Fellow of the Caribbean Research Center (Medgar Evers College, CUNY), Dr. Henke has published numerous articles in academic journals and magazines such as Latin American Perspectives, Cultural Critique, European Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Australian Journal of International Affairs, International Studies, Social Epistemology, Social & Economic Studies, Ideaz, and others. As author and (co-)editor he has published six books: Between Dependency and Self-Determination: Jamaica’s Foreign Relations 1972-1989 (University of the West Indies Press 2000); The West Indian Americans (Greenwood Press 2001); The End of the “Asian Model”? (John Benjamins Publishers 2000); Modern Political Culture in the Caribbean (University of the West Indies Press 2003); Crossing Over: Comparing Recent Migration in the United States and Europe (Lexington Books 2005); and most recently Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean (Lexington Books 2008). He is currently preparing a book manuscript on modern philosophies in Latin American and the Caribbean. In addition, Dr. Henke serves as the editor of migration studies journal Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and its Diasporas. He also currently serves as Vice-President (2009-2010) of the Caribbean Studies Association.
Greg Grandin
Greg Grandin is currently a Professor of History at New York University. Dr. Grandin received his BA from Brooklyn College CUNY and his PhD in History from Yale University in 1999. His new book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, is currently a finalist for the National Book Award (winner announced on Nov 18th). He is also the author of The Blood of Guatemala (Duke, 2000), winner of the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award for the best book on Latin America; The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago, 2004); Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan, 2006).
Dr. Grandin is the co-editor of Human Rights and Revolutions (2007, with Marilyn Young, Jeffrey Wasserstron, and Lynn Hunt); Truth Commissions: State Terror, History, Memory (special issue of Radical History Review, (co-edited with Thomas Klubock, January 2007); A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (with Gilbert Joseph, forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2011).
He has served on the United Nations Truth Commission for Guatemala, as a consultant and has published in Harper’s, The Nation, The London Review of Books, the Boston Review, the New York Times, as well as in numerous academic journals, including the Hispanic American Historical Review, the American Historical Review (“The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, State Formation, and National identity in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala” and “Your Americanism and Mine: Americanism and Anti-Americanism in the Americas”).
He has most recently been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, Ryskamp Fellowship Program.
Dr. Grandin is currently working on two book projects: American Exceptionalisms, a history of US-Latin American relations as immanent critique, and a history of the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the early 1930s, tentatively titled War and Peace: Conflict and Diplomacy in the Making of the Americas.
Dr. Julie M. Feinsilver
Julie Feinsilver is currently an independent consultant and scholar. She has conducted research on Cuban medical diplomacy since 1979, although not continuously. Ms. Feinsilver is the author of the book, Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics At Home and Abroad (University of California Press, 1993), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Cuba dealing with medical diplomacy, biotechnology, non-traditional exports, foreign relations, and the politics of health.
Ms. Feinsilver earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Yale University (1989) and taught Latin American politics and development, environment and development and international law courses at Oberlin College, Bard College, Colgate University and Wesleyan University.
After academia, she worked for the Pan American Health Organization in Research and Technological Development, where she wrote articles on biodiversity and biotechnology and was the scientific editor of and contributor to the book, Biodiversity, Biotechnology and Sustainable Development in Health and Agriculture: Emerging Connections (PAHO, 1996). She later worked as a consultant to both the President of the Osvaldo Cruz Foundation of the Ministry of Health of Brazil and to the Secretary of Science and Technology of Panama. Finally, Ms. Feinsilver spent the last 12 years of her non-academic career at the Inter-American Development Bank in a variety of positions. After leaving the IDB in late 2008, Ms. Feinsilver returned to academic research and writing, but also has continued to work on issues of public sector reform and management for results as an independent consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank.
Dr. Denise Stanley
Denise Stanley holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics from the University of Wisconsin Madison. She previously received degrees from Occidental College, the London School of Economics and Oxford University. She has undertaken internship, missionary, and consulting assignments in the Dominican Republic and Central America for a variety of foundations and non-governmental organizations. Her masters thesis centers on group lending while the doctoral dissertation examines mariculture and non-traditional exports. She is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Economics at California State University-Fullerton, with a specialty in applied microeconomics. She regularly teaches on Latin American Economics. She was a recipient of a Fulbright Teaching and Research Award for the 2006-2007 period to assess the impact of immigrant remittances in the economies of the receiving communities.
Her research interests focus on remittances and migration in Central America, socio-economic and environmental impacts of export industries, basic needs achievement, and broader concerns of survey design and interpretation. Her publications have appeared in journals including the Journal of Development Economics, World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Development Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Finance, Contemporary Economic Policy, Society and Natural Resources, and Grassroots Development.
