Notes on the Contributors

Leslie E. Anderson did her undergraduate work at Bowdoin College and her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan. She is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her research interests include democracy/democratization, electoral studies, institutions, and the popular political role in developing democracies. Her research relies on multiple methods, including in-depth interviews, focus groups, survey research, and extensive fieldwork outside of the United States. Her first book, The Political Ecology of the Modern Peasant: Calculation and Community (Johns Hopkins, 1994) explored popular motives to political action in Central America and proposed a new theory of political action combining community concerns with individual motivation. The book won the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association, Transformational Politics Section. Her second book,co-authored with Lawrence Dodd, is Learning Democracy: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990–2001, (The University of Chicago Press, 2005). It combines multiple methods of data collection and analysis. Recent article publications appear in The Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, America Latina Hoy (Salamanca) and Revue Le Banquet (Paris). She has received fellowships or grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Gardner Foundation of Brown University.

Nancy P. Appelbaum is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She authored Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Duke University Press, 2003) which won the annual book prizes of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the New England Council on Latin American Studies. She co-edited, along with Anne S. Macpherson and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, the book Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). She continues to examine the links between race, region, and nation, while also studying gender and consumption.

Margot Beyersdorff teaches Latin American colonial and modern literature and history in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Quechua language and society for the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in Andean colonial historiography, indigenous cartography, Indo-Hispanic drama and ethnopoetics. She is the author of Historia y drama ritual en los Andes bolivianos, siglos XVI–XX (La Paz: Plural Editores, 1998, 2003).

Jonathan C. Brown is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published four single-authored books: A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1979); Oil and Revolution in Mexico (University of California Press, 1993), Latin America: A Social History of the Colonial Period (2^nd ed., Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), and A Brief History of Argentina (Facts-on-File, 2003). Two of these books have been translated and published in Latin America. His first book on Argentina, published by Cambridge University Press, won the Bolton Prize and the colonial volume won the Hamilton Prize of the University Cooperative Society. Brown also edited a collection of essays on workers and populism in Latin America and co-edited books on the Mexican oil industry and on Argentine social history. Professor Brown has published articles in the American Historical Review, the Latin American Research Review, and the Hispanic American Historical Review and in Mexican and Argentine academic journals. His long-range research project concerns the formation of the Mexican oil workers union. Between 1988 and 1998, Professor Brown directed numerous seminars in U.S. studies for Latin American scholars as well as a university affiliation project in U.S. studies with the Universidad de Chile that was funded by the United States Information Agency.

R. Andrew Chesnut is Professor of Latin American History at the University of Houston. His first book, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty (Rutgers University Press, 1997) explores the meteoric growth of evangelical Protestantism among the Brazilian popular classes. Competitive Spirits: Latin America's New Religious Economy (Oxford University Press, 2003) his latest book, considers the development of religious...