LSGS's Spring 2017 programming focused on ongoing public talks conceptualized as "Histories of the American Latino/a: Lectures, Archives,
and the Public," which gave prominence to the diverse and complex histories of U.S. Latino and Latina communities. The two featured historians were Professors Geraldo L. Cadava and Lorrin Thomas. Professor Cadava is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University and the author of Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of the 2014 Frederick Jackson Turner Award by the Organization of American Historians. Prof. Cadava spoke on the history of Latino conservatism, the topic of his second monograph. Professor Thomas is an Associate Professor of History and co-director of Latin American and Latino Studies at Rutgers University-Camden. Her first book, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), received the Saloutos prize of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society of the Organization of American Historians and earned honorable mention from the Casa de las Américas prize. Professor Thomas's second book project is a study of Latinas and Latinos and the genesis of “minority” and multiracial politics in the 1970s.
John Moran Gonzalez, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at the University of Texas at Austin, also visited in Spring 2017. Professor Morán González is the author of Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (University of Texas Press, 2009) and The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels (Ohio State University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and the co-editor of The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018 [forthcoming]). His talk focuses on the "Refusing to Forget" project, alongside scholarly interventions and activism with the public sphere. His lecture was co-sponsored by the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South at Duke and the UNC Latina/o Studies Program.
... And students enrolled in the LSGS 490 seminar on "Autobiography and Memoir" participated in Skype sessions with memoirists Lila Quintero Weaver, author-illustrator of Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White (University of Alabama Press, 2012) and writer Wendy C. Ortiz, author of the "dreammoir" Bruja (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016).
PROGRAM IN LATINO STUDIES IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH