Leadership and Staff

Edward Wright-Rios, Interim-Director (Email):  Edward Wright-Ríos (Professor of History and Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities) is a cultural historian specializing in modern Mexico. His new book on pilgrimage – Devotion in Motion: Pilgrimage in Modern Mexico – will come out with the University of Chicago Press in spring 2025. The project is simultaneously a historical, visual, and digital analysis of a cultural phenomenon that has proven extraordinarily resilient and remarkably dynamic over the centuries. In particular, he focuses on the last 60 to 70 years as technological changes, social media, and transportation improvements fueled the expansion of pilgrimage. It has included participation in a six-day walking pilgrimage alongside thousands of devotees and collaboration with Mike Dubose, a professional photographer. Devotion in Motion won Professor Wright-Ríos a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/edward-wright-rios/ (please scroll to the bottom to see some of the photographs). Professor Wright-Rios teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on colonial and modern Latin America, reform and revolution, Mexico, popular culture, the social and cultural impact of the drug trade, and religious change. He has given lectures on Mexican art, dance, and politics at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. He has been an active member of CLACX for 20 years. Specializations: Latin America; cultural history; religious change; modern Mexico; popular culture and forms of expression; Catholicism; women and the Catholic Church; masculinity, femininity and religiosity; and ethnohistory

Celso Thomas Castilho, Director on sabbatical AY 2024-2025 (Email): Celso Thomas Castilho is the director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Castilho’s research focuses on the political, cultural, and intellectual histories of modern Latin America. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley, where he began work on slavery and abolition in Brazil; other interests include the public sphere, literary culture, and Afro-diasporic thought. His first book, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), received three prizes, including the 2018 Bolton-Johnson Prize from the Conference of Latin American History for best book in the field of Latin American history. He is currently at work on two book-length monographs that broaden the scope of the cultural and intellectual histories of slavery and Afro-Latin America. He is also interested in bridging conversations between Latin American and Latinx studies, developing a project on soccer, the Spanish-language media in the US, and the 1994 World Cup.

Avery Dickins de Girón, Executive Director (Email): Avery Dickins de Girón is the Executive Director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies. She oversees CLACX operations, including center programming and staff, outreach, NRC and FLAS budgets, and grant-writing. Dickins de Girón spearheads our collaborations with Minority Serving Institutions, most recently working with Tuskegee University to establish a Portuguese language program, and with Meharry Medical College to provide medical Spanish and expand clinical experiences abroad. Dickins de Girón works with faculty across the university to support coursework relating to Latin America, and regularly contributes to our professional development activities for K-16 educators. She manages the Latin American Garden and its related database. An interactive learning tool for Vanderbilt students, faculty, staff, and local K-12 educators, the garden houses over 50 species of plants native to Latin America and is located on the west side of Vanderbilt’s campus. Dickins de Girón holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a B.A/ in Biology. Her research examines insecurity in Guatemala and international development programs in Q’eqchi’ Maya communities in Alta Verapaz.

Gretchen Selcke, Assistant Director (Email): Gretchen Selcke is the assistant director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. Her research interests include Latinx literature and culture, Afro Hispanic literature, and Latinx entrepreneurship. She received her doctorate from Vanderbilt University, where she began work on diasporic literature from the Spanish Caribbean. Currently, she is working on a book-length manuscript on contemporary Latinx narratives. As a Library Dean’s Fellow for the Manuel Zapata Olivella Special Collections Correspondence at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt, she helped create an online exhibit of representative correspondence and documents from four linear feet of Zapata Olivella’s personal archives. Selcke has been elected the 2022-2023 president of the Latinx Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).In addition, Selcke serves on the editorial board of the Afro-Hispanic Review.

Alma Paz-Sanmiguel, Administrative Specialist (Email): Alma Paz-Sanmiguel joined CLACX in July 2011 as Administrative Assistant II. Alma has a background in graphic arts and small business management. Alma’s duties include providing administrative support for CLACX faculty and staff, coordinating logistics of visiting speakers, and helping to strengthen the Center’s relationships both on and off campus in cultural outreach for the Latin American community thru events such as Cheekwood’s Dia de los Muertos Festival, organizes the Latin American Images Photo Competition and current advisor for the Vanderbilt’s Ballet Folklorico de Mexico student organization, she is also an advisor to immersion program for students as a requirement course for graduation. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Lara Lookabaugh, Librarian (Email): Lara Lookabaugh is the Librarian and Curator for Latin American, Iberian, and Latinx Studies at Vanderbilt Libraries. She is an interdisciplinary feminist geographer of memory and political futures with a research agenda focused on collaborative, arts-based memory work with a Mam Maya women’s collective in Guatemala and a second strand of research that interrogates the temporal politics of archives. She works to understand how communities in Latin American and the US South envision and enact alternative futures in the context of colonization, neoliberal capitalism, and shifting political regimes. Lara is a founding member of the Desirable Futures editorial and writing collective that brings together scholars to explore colonial constructions of time and futurity. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida, and an MS in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University. Lara previously worked as a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University and as the Visiting Assistant Librarian for Research and Instruction in the University of Florida Latin American and Caribbean Collection.

Luisa Mattos, Program Coordinator (Email): Luisa is the Program Coordinator of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies. Originally from Brazil, she holds a B.S. in Education with a specialization in Public Policies from the University of Brasilia.  While pursuing her Business and Economics degree in the United States, she has worked with the Federal Reserve Bank on a scholar program to potentialize economics education access in the United States. Luisa is bilingual in Portuguese and English and has translated academic and other publications. In 2023, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission awarded her the Harold Love Outstanding Community Service Award for her consistent commitment and collaboration within the Tennessean community. In her role at CLACX, Luisa oversees programs with K-16 educators, coordinates CLACX and joint events and activities on and off campus, establishes cross-institutional collaborations, leads communications, and serves as a liaison between CLACX and our affiliated student organizations and alumni.

Jesús Ruiz’s, Director of Caribbean Studies Minor and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Coordinator (Email):

Dr. Jesús G. Ruiz received his Ph.D. from Tulane University and was previously an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University and an NEH Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt. A historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, his research focuses on Afro-Latin America, Migration & Diaspora, and Haiti’s revolutionary history. His first book, The Black Royalists: Haiti and A Politics of Freedom in the Atlantic World (under contract with Harvard University Press), examines the role of royalism in Haiti’s struggle for independence. His article, “Freedom, Faith & Sovereignty: The 1796 Boca Nigua Revolt as an “Afro-Catholic Royalist Rebellion,” was recently published in Slavery & Abolition. At Vanderbilt, Ruiz teaches courses on Caribbean Studies and Migration & Asylum. He will begin his term as Faculty Head of Moore College in Summer 2025. He is also affiliated with the Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership (CAL). In 2025, he organized CLACX’s inaugural Caribbean Week, securing major Vanderbilt grants. His public scholarship has appeared in The Washington Post, and he has received teaching awards from both Tulane and Vanderbilt. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, NEH, Fulbright, and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard, among others.