CLACX Year in Review
Latest Issue (2023-2024)
2024 CLACX Year in Review
Director’s Corner
Colegas,
We are delighted to present the 2023-24 Year-in-Review, a collaborative effort of the CLACX team, driven and produced by Dr. Avery Dickins de Girón. We shared manyjoyful moments—from hosting a 12-person Colombian dance troupe, to launching new research and teaching initiatives, to celebrating the center’s 75th anniversary and honoring the retirements of Marshall Eakin and Paula Covington. We acknowledge the unfailing support from the Dean’s Office in the College of Arts & Science, Provost Raver, and Chancellor Diermeier. The college continued its strong support of CLACX this year and enabled the hire of Dr. Jesús Ruiz as an assistant professor of the practice of Caribbean Studies (see story inside). The center is also excited to welcome a new NEH Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Jason Ahlenius, of NYU, whose work explores race and labor in the Mexican borderlands.
We completed the third year of the reconfigured CLACX in 2023-24, and, among other accomplishments, deepened our commitment to fostering research on the intersections of the fields of Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean studies. If in year two we organized symposia at Vanderbilt and at national conferences to call attention to these discussions, in year three we supported a new research seminar titled, “Latinidades,” to collectively reflect upon and critically interrogate these possibilities. Co-led by Drs. Julie Gamble, Rebeca Gamez, and Hilario Lomelí, the seminar launched in Spring ’24, and
featured three lunchtime sessions around different works-in-progress.
With former ACLS postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Sara Kozameh, currently an assistant professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, I co-authored a think piece on how the projects of Latin American and Latino studies need to connect to the changing demographics of university students nationally, namely the increase of Latino students, as well as, the
fast-expanding number of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, which amount to nearly 600 institutions. These are both structural changes in higher education that necessarily force us to reckon with the importance of the Latin American diaspora in the United States, with questions about power, knowledge production, and representation. The essay grew from seminars CLACX organized last year, which brought specialists from across the country to ponder these issues on the state of our fields.
This was an overall important year in deepening our efforts to shape the field through teaching and research. We’re moving forward with new curricular programs and have strengthened our relationships with partner institutions in the greater region around expanding the scope and access of Latin American studies. I close in reiterating my appreciation for two wonderful colleagues, Marshall Eakin and Paula Covington, who in countless ways have shaped Latin American studies at Vanderbilt since the 1970s and 80s. On a more personal note, I will be on research leave next academic year, and am excited for the upcoming leadership of Dr. Edward Wright-Ríos, Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities.
Hasta pronto,
Celso Thomas Castilho, Director
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