Regional Faculty Affiliates
The Regional Faculty Affiliate program formally recognizes colleagues at other institutions that have close relationships with CLACX through research, engagement in local K-16 outreach, or other ties. Faculty affiliates are approved by the CLACX Steering Committee and appointed by the Dean of Arts and Science; they have access to Vanderbilt’s library as well as other privileges. For more information, contact Celso Castilho.
Matthew Blair is research associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Tennessee State University. Both a plant breeder and molecular geneticist, he specializes in the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) and amaranth, both of which are important staples native to the Americas. Blair works closely with Avery Dickins de Girón on the Latin American Garden, providing plants and participating in professional development workshops featuring the garden. Blair holds a PhD in Plant Breeding from Cornell University and an MS in Agronomy from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez; prior to joining the TSU faculty in 2013, he lived and worked in Colombia.
Rhonda Collier is an associate professor of English at Tuskegee University, where she also serves as the Director of the TU Global Office. She is a Fulbright Scholar, who studied at the Universidad de São Paulo in Brazil. Besides her PhD in comparative literature from Vanderbilt University, she holds a BS and a master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Georgia Tech respectively. She has published in the areas of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, African-American, and global hip hop studies. At Tuskegee University, she focuses on American literature, Black American literature, and composition courses with an emphasis on service-learning. Her work “Mothering Cuba: The Poetics of Afro-Cuban Women” appears in Another Black Like Me: The Construction of Identities and Solidarity in the African Diaspora (2015). She recently published on Afro-German hip hop in the College Language Association Journal. She discusses art as a space of forgiveness and reconciliation. She is passionate about education abroad and cross-cultural student engagement.
Theron Corse is a professor of Latin American history, geography and political science in Tennessee State University’s Department of History, Geography, and Political Science. He also presently serves as coordinator of interdisciplinary studies. His book Protestants, Revolution, and the Cuba-US Bond (2007) looks at one aspect of civil society in Communist Cuba–the Protestant experience–and at continuing links between Cuba and the United States that do not focus on diplomatic issues.
Gustavo Goldman is professor in ciencias farmaceuticas at the Universidade de São Paulo. His areas of expertise include molecular biology, fungal genetics, and microbiology. A world-renowned expert on fungi and fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, his current research focuses on Aspergillus fumigatus, one of the most common Aspergillus species to cause disease in individuals with an immunodeficiency. He collaborates closely with Antonis Rokas and his lab at Vanderbilt on the genomics and evolution of pathogenic fungi in Brazil. Goldman holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from Rijksuniversiteit Gent in Belgium.
Gregory Hammond is an assistant professor of history at Austin Peay State University’s Department of History and Philosophy. His book The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Feminism in Argentina from Roca to Peròn examines how and why women won their voting rights when they did in Argentina, and his present research examines the same issue for Peru. Hammond is active in the Sister City program between Nashville and Mendoza, Argentina, and taught at the Soto Cano airbase in Honduras in 2013.
Larry Harrington was appointed by the White House as UA Executive Director of the Inter-American Development Bank from 1995 until December of 2001. After this he was based in Mexico where he served as the US Representative of the Inter-American Development Bank from 2004 to 2008. He also represented the US on the board of the Inter-American Investment Corporation and the Donors Committee of the Multilateral Investment Fund, both of which promote private sector investment in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
David LaFevor is assistant professor of Latin American history and digital humanities at the University of Texas Arlington. He coauthored The Third Century: A History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (2017) with Michael LaRosa and Mark Gilderhus. His second book manuscript, “Prizefighting and Civilization: Race, the Public Sphere, and Identity in Cuba and Mexico, 1840s-1940s” is complete and under review. LaFevor is an accomplished photographer of Latin America; his work been exhibited in dozens of venues and published by the Huffington Post, NBC News, and other national and international publications. He recently collaborated with CLACX and Tennessee State University to feature his photographs of Cuba and related professional development workshop. LaFevor is the director of the multiyear Digital Humanities project Siete Villas de Cuba, which locates, digitizes, preserves, and publishes endangered colonial documents pertinent to the African diaspora in Cuba from the 16h to the late 19th centuries. He earned his PhD in history from Vanderbilt and continues to collaborate closely with Professor Jane Landers.
Michael LaRosa is associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis. At Miami, he studied with the Peruvianist Steve Stein and the late Brazilianist Robert M.Levine. LaRosa focuses on the history of contemporary Colombia. He has worked as visiting professor at several universities in Bogotá, twice under the auspices of the J. William Fulbright program. His most recent publication, a co-authored text with the Colombian historian Germán R. Mejía is titled Colombia: A Concise Contemporary History which released in a second edition in 2017. In Colombia, the book was published as Historia concisa de Colombia with Penguin/Random House the same year.
Jana Morgan is associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her award-winning research explores how patterns of economic, social, and political marginalization undermine democratic institutions and processes across the Americas. Her work has been published in outlets including American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, and Latin American Research Review and has received funding from various sources including the Russell Sage Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hays program. Morgan a is also actively involved in the Vanderbilt-based Latin American Public Opinion Project.
Stephen D. Morris is professor of political science at Middle Tennessee State University. From 1989-2009, he directed the international studies program at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Political Corruption in Mexico: The Impact of Democratization, Gringolandia: Mexican Identity and Perceptions of the U.S., Political Reformism in Mexico, and Corruption and Politics in Mexico, and co-editor with Charles Blake of Corruption and Democracy in Latin America and Corruption and Politics in Latin America. He has recently published two new books: The Corruption Debates: Left vs. Right-and Does It Matter-in the Americas and The Corruption Dilemma: Controlling the Power of the Powerful.
Richard Pace is professor of anthropology at Middle Tennessee State University. Since the early 1980s, Pace has conducted ethnographic research in the Brazilian Amazon among ribeirinho populations (the indigenous peasantry) with a focus on political ecology and the impact of media. His current research projects include a historical ecology of the Amazonian municipality of Gurupá (combining archaeological and ethnographic research); a longitudinal study of the socio-environmental impact of the Belo Monte Dam upon communities of the lower Xingu and Amazon Rivers; and a nation-wide restudy of the impact television in Brazil.
Gerald Reed has over twenty-five years of public sector experience in both the United States and internationally. Reed initiated his international work in 1989 with a two year assignment as an organizational development advisor at the United Nations Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (ILANUD) in San José, Costa Rica. Reed continues to work at the international level as a consultant with assignments in El Salvador and Paraguay and is Adjunct Professor in Political Science at MTSU.
Christoph Rosenmüller is a professor of Latin American history at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. He teaches the United States and World history surveys as well as upper-division and graduate courses in Latin American history. He received three Fulbright grants for his work on historical corruption. He has also been a research fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation (2017–2018), of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History in Frankfurt (Germany, 2016–2017), and of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, fall 2015). While on these grants, he served as a visiting professor at the Colegio de México in Mexico City, the Karl Franzens University of Graz (Austria), the University of Münster (Germany). His book titled Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650–1755 is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. This book draws on research in seven languages. His recent publications include the edited volumes Corruption in the Iberian Empires. Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (2017), and (with Stephan Ruderer) “Dávidas, Dones, Dinero:” Aportes a la nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina, desde el imperio español hasta la modernidad (2016), and the book Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (2008). Rosenmüller has published articles in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Latin American Research Review, and the Estudios de Historia Novohispana, among others, and various chapters in edited books.