Notes on the Contributors
Frederick Luis Aldama is Professor of English and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, Columbus, where he teaches Chicano/a, Latino/a, and postcolonial literature and film. Previous publications include Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Artists and Writers, and Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity, as well as the MLA award-winning Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. His articles and interviews have appeared in numerous journals, and he is currently finishing a book on Latino/a comics.
Jo-Marie Burt teaches politics at George Mason University. She is co-editor, with Philip Mauceri, of Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, Reform (University of Pittsburgh, 2004) and is completing a manuscript on political violence in Peru. As a consultant to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2002–2003, she investigated the causes, trajectory, and impact of political violence in the urban community of Villa El Salvador. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar and is researching truth commissions and other forms of transitional justice in Latin America.
Kwame Dixon is currently a visiting Professor of Black Studies at DePauw University. His primary research is focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. He is interested in the social construction of racial categories; how racial and gender discrimination intersect to create particular forms of discrimination that lead to human rights violations; and the ways in which Afro-Latinos create alternative forms of political participation. He is a Fulbright scholar and has conducted extensive field research on Afro-American communities in Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
Paul Firbas is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. His work focuses on colonial South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly epic poetry and historiography. He has prepared a study and a critical and annotated edition of Armas Antárticas, a poem by Juan de Miramontes Zuázola (Lima: PUCP, 2006) and published articles on Sarmiento de Gamboa, Inca Garcilaso, geography, cartography, and colonial cultural traditions.
Ted Henken is an Assistant Professor in the Black and Hispanic Studies and the Sociology and Anthropology Departments at Baruch College, City University of New York. He teaches courses on international migration, race and ethnic relations, U.S.-Latin American relations, contemporary Cuban culture and society, and the history and development [End Page 266] of Cuban music. He is currently working on a book on micro-enterprise in socialist Cuba and conducting a transnational study of the Mexican indigenous communities in the U.S. South.
Stacey Hunt is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick. As a Fulbright scholar in Colombia in 2002–2003, she researched women's political participation and quota laws. Current research interests include state building, urban planning, and the politics of space, violence, and collective memory.
Peggy Lovell is Associate Professor in Sociology and Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published a number of articles on racial and gender inequality and child mortality in Brazil. Her current research includes a study of women of Japanese descent in Brazil and a study of occupational segregation and industrial transformation in Brazil.
Bryan McCann is Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History at Georgetown University. His first book, Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil, explores the cultural transformations of Brazil's Vargas Period. He is now researching a book on the neighborhood association movement and conflicts over urban space in Rio de Janeiro in the second half of the twentieth century.
Christopher Mitchell is Professor of Politics at New York University. He has published on populist political parties in Latin America and on inter-American diplomatic relations in the field of migration. He was the editor of Changing Perspectives in Latin American Studies: Insights from Six Disciplines (Stanford University Press, 1988). His current research focuses on urban politics, decentralization, and government reform in the...
