Viranjini Munasinghe's research interests focus on nationalism, race and ethnicity, creolization and indigeneity, Asian American Studies, South Asian Diaspora, Labor and Political Economy of Plantation Societies, Historical Anthropology, Anthropological Theory, Comparison, Postcolonial Theory. Her geographic research area is Trinidad and the Asian Diaspora in the Americas.

Geographic Research Area: Trinidad and the Asian Diaspora in the Americas

Matthew Velasco is an anthropological bioarchaeologist who studies ancient populations of the Peruvian Andes through the analysis of their skeletal remains. His research explores the emergence of novel ethnic identities and cultural traditions during the era preceding and encompassing Inka imperial expansion in the 15th century. To explore how these dynamic social transformations impacted the lived experience of the body and its treatment at death, he analyzes and interpret indicators of social identity, biological relatedness, diet, and health status written on the human skeleton.

Irina Troconis’s areas of specialization include: Memory Studies, Venezuelan Studies, Politics and Performance, Affect Theory, and Digital Humanities. Her book project, Spectral Remains: Memory, Affect, and the State in the Afterglow of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, explores through the lens of spectrality the memory narratives and practices developed around the figure of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in the seven years following his death. She is also working on two new research projects. The first examines the performance work of Venezuelan artists in the diaspora.

Vilma Santiago-Irizarry’s research has focused on the unintended consequences, paradoxes, and contradictions generated in the articulation and deployment of ethnoracial identity constructs, particularly in the United States and in institutional settings, where they are applied toward the reproduction of structures of inequality. Her other research interests and areas of expertise include language, law, field methods, and institutional culture.

Amanda Rodewald’s research and interests focus on population and community responses to changes in land use, climate, invasive species, and disturbance regimes; socioecological dynamics and conservation in working landscapes; eco-evolutionary dynamics in human-dominated and urbanizing systems; sustainable management of temperate and tropical forests; conservation planning and prioritization, innovative finance and market-based instruments to support conservation and communities.

Simone Pinet's teaching and research focus on medieval and early modern Spanish literatures and cultures, from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, especially in relation to spatiality, economics, poetics, and translation.

Edmundo Paz-Soldan is winner of the Bolivian National Book Award (1992 and 2003), and the Juan Rulfo Short Story Award (1997). He has published Alcides Arguedas y la narrativa de la nación enferma (Plural, 2003), and is the coeditor, with Debra Castillo, of the volume of critical essays Latin American Literature and Mass Media (Garland, 2000), and, with Alberto Fuguet, of the anthology of short stories Se habla español: Voces latinas en U.S.A. (Alfaguara, 2000).

Cecelia Lawless teaches both language and literature/film courses as a senior lecturer. For several years, she was the faculty fellow for the Spanish Language House at Alice Cook. For five years, she helped to found and then serve as Director of the Foreign Language Across the Curriculum Program (FLAC) that offers Spanish language sections in conjunction with established courses in a variety of disciplines. Lawless has participated in and is now Director of the successful Summer Program in Madrid.

John S. Henderson’s research interests center on early complex societies and how archaeology can explore the processes through which they develop. How do distinctions in status, wealth, and authority emerge within and between communities? Under what circumstances do these distinctions intensify into stratification? How does stratification relate to the centralization of political power, to the emergence of kings and states?