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Kin Chan has taught a variety of courses, including all levels of Spanish language, Conversation & Composition, literature and Translation. Before coming to Eastern, he coordinated language courses at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Romance Languages. He also taught briefly as Swarthmore College.
Areas of Interests
Spanish grammar, etymology & development of the Spanish language, Spanish-English translation, Spanish idioms, conversation & composition
Courses Taught for the Program
LAS-319/SPA-318 Latin American Civilization
LAS-320/SPA-320 Spanish Literature I
LAS-321/SPA-321 Spanish Literature II
Additional Information
Department of World Languages and Cultures
Webb Hall, Room 226
ChanK@easternct.edu
Dickson Cunningham is a Professor of Environmental Earth Science at Eastern Connecticut State University, having previously worked as an academic in the UK for 18 years at the University of Leicester. He earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, his Masters from the University of Arizona and his A.B from Dartmouth. He also held NSF and NATO postdoctoral fellowships in Brazil and England respectively. Dickson is a structural geologist and tectonicist with an extensive record of field-based research investigating mountain building processes in South America, Asia and Europe. His PhD work involved the crustal evolution of the Patagonian Andes in southernmost Chile and he has since carried out field-based research on the tectonic development of the Brazilian Highlands. He also has published on the origin of Drake Passage which separates South America from Antarctica. He has published over 70 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and given more than 80 first-authored presentations at international conferences including an invited keynote presentation in Ouro Preto, Brazil in 2012.
Areas of Interest
Structural evolution and tectonic geomorphology of the Brazilian Highlands, tectonic development of the Patagonian Andes, mineral deposits of northern Chile, Andean glacial lake outburst flood hazards.
Additional Information
Department of Environmental Earth Science
Science Building, Room 264
CunninghamW@easternct.edu
Christine Garcia (Ph.D. University of New Mexico) is an Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. She earned her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of New Mexico. She earned both her B.A. and M.A. from Angelo State University in her hometown of San Angelo, Texas, with a focus on Chicana/o Literature. Her current research focuses on Chicanx Rhetorics, Gloria Anzaldúa autohistoria-teoria, and Labor and Civil Rights Rhetorics.
Areas of Interest
Chicanx Rhetorics, Gloria Anzaldúa autohistoria-teoria, and Labor and Civil Rights Rhetorics.
Additional Information
Department of English
Webb Hall, Room 247
GarciaChris@easternct.edu
Mary Lorena Kenny (PhD Columbia, MPH Columbia) is a cultural anthropologist and professor of anthropology. She has worked for almost two decades conducting field research in Northeast Brazil. Her work focuses on the issues of heritage, memory, and identity, human rights and social justice, and recently Haitian migration to Brazil. She was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship to study cultural heritage at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and is currently working on a manuscript about quilombos (maroon communities). Selected publications include Child Labor, Oxford University Press (2014); The Contours of Quilombola Identity in the Sertão, Brazilian Slavery and Its Legacies. Luso-Brazilian Review (2013); The social and political use of quilombola heritage. Sharing Cultures (2011); La construcción del patrimonio en los quilombos brasileños Antípoda (2011); Landscapes of Memory: Drought and Concentration Camps in Ceará, Brazil, Latin American Perspectives (2009) [Reprint as Seca, Campos de concentrações, e Turismo. Desafios e Perspectivas in Revista Tendências: Caderno de Ciências Sociais, Brasil 2015]; Deeply rooted in the present: making heritage in Brazilian quilombos. Intangible Heritage Routledge (2009); Hidden Heads of Households: Child Labor in Northeast Brazil, University of Toronto Press (2007); Drought, Clientalism, Fatalism and Fear in Northeast Brazil Ethics, Place and Environment (2002); Orators and Outcasts, Wanderers and Workers: Street Children in Brazil. Symbolic Childhood (2002); No Visible Means of Support: Child Labor in the urban, informal labor market in Northeast Brazil. Human Organization (1999).
Areas of Interest
Heritage, memory, and identity; Afro-Brazilian culture and politics; child labor; medical, cultural, applied anthropology, politics of ethnography, public health (international health, reproductive rights).
Additional Information
Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work
Webb Hall, Room 438
KennyM@easternct.edu
Martín Mendoza-Botelho is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, Philosophy and Geography at Eastern Connecticut State University. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge (U.K.), a Masters’ degree in Economic Development (MPhil) from the University of Glasgow (U.K.) and a Bachelor’s in Economics from the Catholic University of Bolivia. He specializes on issues of institutional strengthening and social and economic development in developing countries with emphasis on Latin America and Bolivia, his country of origin. His academic experience includes work at Tulane University in New Orleans, including postdoctoral work at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and George Washington University among other academic centres. He also served at the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Washington D.C. and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Bolivia. He has received several teaching and research awards, including a national research award from the Programme for Strategic Research in Bolivia (PIEB) and was recipient of the British Chevenning. He has published several pieces in peer-reviewed journals and is the current editor of the Bolivian Research Review journal.
Areas of Interest
Political economy, poverty reduction initiatives; decentralization and local development; human and social development, processes of social and indigenous participation; political institutional transformation; democratization and citizenship; social capital and social policies; Andean region; Bolivia.
Courses Taught for the Program
LAS-240 / PSC-240 Latin American Politics
Additional Information
Department of Political Science, Philosophy and Geography
Webb Hall, Room 355
MendozabotelhoM@easternct.edu
Joan Meznar received her Ph.D. in History and Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her early research focused on popular culture in nineteenth-century Brazil, in particular on how individuals who were neither masters nor slaves participated in the new nation. Those interests resulted in publications on the role of female honor in determining who among the free poor would be conscripted into the new Brazilian army, as well as whose children would be tapped to fill the labor gap in the years just before the abolition of African slavery. Her current research examines ways in which religion, and especially devotion to specific representations of the Virgin Mary, has contributed to a Brazilian national identity. Professor Meznar has been a member of the faculties of Mount Holyoke College, the University of South Carolina, Westmont College, and Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research in Brazil, Portugal, and Italy has been funded by two Fulbright fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Grant, and numerous grants from her home institutions. She has also participated in several National Endowment for the Humanities Seminars and Institutes for College Teachers.
Areas of Interest
Brazil, culture, religion, gender.
Courses Taught for the Program
LAS-255 / HIS-255 Introduction to Latin American History
LAS-342 / HIS-342 Modern Latin America
LAS-345 / HIS-345 History of Mexico
LAS-346 / HIS-346 Central America
LAS-347 / HIS-347 History of Brazil
Ricardo Pérez (Ph.D. 2000 University of Connecticut) joined Eastern Connecticut State University in 2001 as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Currently, he is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. His area of specialization is cultural anthropology and his teaching and research interests include economic and urban anthropology, transnational migration, globalization and sustainable development, especially in the fishing and tourism sectors. His current research focuses on state-driven development processes in the context of economic and cultural globalization and examines the economic, cultural, and environmental impacts of tourism development in Cuba. Since 2005, he has been conducting field research in the Sabana-Camaguey Archipelago, an ’emerging tourist area’ in the north-central coast of Cuba, where some of the most important tourism development projects on the island are under way. Currently, he is writing a manuscript (tentatively entitled Authentically Global: Cuban Culture and Economy in the Age of Mass Tourism) about sustainable tourism development and environmental conservation in Cuba since the start of the Special Period in the 1990s. Prior to this research experience, between 1996 and 2002 he conducted research in southern Puerto Rico and examined the transformation of the agrarian economy in three communities where government intervention since the 1940s has sought to modernize traditional forms of economic production. Out of this original research, he published a book and several articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Areas of Interest
Cultural, economic and urban anthropology; transnational migration; globalization; social theory; sustainable development; the Spanish-speaking Caribbean; U.S. Latino Studies.
Courses Taught for the Program
LAS-225 / ANT-225 Contemporary Puerto Rican Culture and Society
LAS-240 / ANT-240 Latinos in the United States
Additional Information
Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work
Webb Hall, Room 433
PerezR@easternct.edu
James W. Russell (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison) recently retired as Professor of Sociology. His research has centered on social, economic, and political change in Latin America and the rise of and challenges to U.S. domination of it. From 1990 to 1992 he was Senior Fulbright Researcher and Lecturer at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. He is the author of eight books, including Class and Race Formation in North America: Mexico, Canada, the United States (University of Toronto Press); Escape from Texas: A Novel of Slavery and the Texas War of Independence (Sloan Publishing); and, with Silvia Núñez García, Clase y Sociedad en Estados Unidos (Ed. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).
Areas of Interest
Mexico, Cuba, Central America, class and racial inequality.
Dr. Villanueva has an extensive worldwide teaching experience. He has taught at the University level in Argentina, France, and Spain, and was a Faculty for 7 years in Dubai for the public college system of the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Villanueva is currently an Associate Professor of Management and Marketing at Eastern. He got his MSc from the University of Paris, and a MPhil and a PhD from the University of Barcelona. A native of Argentina, Dr. Villanueva was early engaged in politics and economic development issues in his country of origin. Representing the local conservative party, he was selected by the Government of France to attend the ESCP-EAP in Paris, where he studied global commercial and economic integration. Dr. Villanueva is a specialist in the wine industry of Argentina, and permanently shares this expertise in academic conferences around the world. He is a founding member of the Editorial Board of RIVAR, the journal of the Iberoamerican Society of Agribusiness, Viticulture, and Rural Issues.
Areas of Interest
Latin American economic history, Argentinean political and economic history, Argentinean wine economic and business history.
Additional Information
Department of Business Administration
Webb Hall, Room 444
VillanuevaE@easternct.edu