Jorge Mangonnet
Assistant Professor
Before joining Vanderbilt, I was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford (2020-2023). My research focuses on comparative politics and historical political economy, and my primary region of interest is Latin America. My research agenda addresses two questions: (1) How do states and societies build property rights institutions? (2) How do property rights institutions shape power, norms, and conflict? My book project, "Labor Emancipation and Property Rights Formation," examines how the abolition of labor-repressive institutions (e.g., slavery or the slave trade) can influence the creation of private property rights in land. It draws on unused archival documents from Imperial Brazil collected during a year of fieldwork. Currently, I am expanding my book project to the American South in the postbellum period and collecting archival data from the southern legislatures in the 1857-1877 period. My academic work employs multi-method approaches that combine regression-type designs with qualitative strategies in comparative historical analysis and extensive fieldwork. I received my Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. I also completed an M.A. at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and a B.A. at the Universidad del Salvador-both in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I am originally from.