VISITING SCHOLARS

Veneta Andonova
Postdoctoral Fellow

Research Interest: Veneta Andonova is Associate Professor at the Universidad de los Andes, School of Management (Colombia). Before joining Universidad de los Andes she was Associate Professor at the ITAM (Mexico). Her current research interests are at the intersection of firm strategy and economic development. She is a regular presenter at the Academy of Management and ISNIE (International Society of New Institutional Economics) meetings. While at Brown Professor Andonova will advance a book project tentatively titled, “Private Paths to Prosperity when Institutions are Weak: Firm-Level Strategies in Latin America.”

Jason Cortés
Visiting Scholar in Latin American Studies

Research Interest: Contemporary Spanish American literature, Caribbean literature, US Latino Literature, Comparative Literature, and Critical Theory. He has published articles in journals such as Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Iberoamericana, and Latin American Theatre Review, in topics ranging from Spanish American literature, ethics and authority, Puerto Rican masculinities, and cultural representations of death and necrophilia in Latin America.  He is currently working towards the completion of a book manuscript entitled, Caribbean Masculinities: Ethics, Authority, and the Poetics of Self-Representation in Contemporary Narrative.  Other work in progress includes a book manuscript tentatively entitled, Loving Death: The Necrophilic Imagination in Contemporary Spanish America.

Adrián López-Denis
Cogut Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities

Research Interest: “Public Health and Popular Healing in Colonial
Cuba” Adrián is writing a book about the impact of epidemics on the articulation of modern sanitary practices in the Spanish Caribbean during the long nineteenth century. Combining insights coming from the historiography of slavery, science, and colonialism, this work is an attempt to explain the emergence of hybrid forms of both healing and policing the body of the nation. His ultimate goal is to explore the epistemic consequences of recasting Western medicine as an Atlantic, rather than a European invention.

Meida McNeal
Cogut Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities

Research Interest: "Choreographing Citizenship in the Gayelle: Performing Trinidadian Nationalism." Meida is revising her dissertation into a book. This comparative ethnographic study focuses on four Afro- and Indo-Trinidadian dance companies.  Analyzing the relationship between cultural production and variables of difference (race/ethnicity, class and gender), the study contributes to current discourse about citizenship and nation-building in the post-colonial Caribbean through the arena of cultural production as both a local and globally situated enterprise.

Elana Shever
Watson Institute Visiting Fellow

Research Interest: Elana Shever is a cultural anthropologist who examines the governance of
natural resources, globalization and inequality through ethnographic and historical investigation of the politics of petroleum production and consumption in the Americas.  Her current research probes the development of the Argentine state oil company, and the shift to a corporate-led oil
industry. She is writing an ethnography that examines the lives of middle class oil workers and their families in Northwest Patagonia, impoverished residents of the shantytown bordering the refineries in metropolitan Buenos Aires, and wealthy managers of transnational oil companies.  Her analysis unites political economy and affect to illuminate how neoliberal structural adjustment transformed petroleum producers and consumers, their households and their communities, as it altered the structure of the oil industry and the state.  While at Brown, Dr. Shever will also be teaching a seminar called "The Ethnography of Corporations" in the fall semester.

C. Joshua Tucker
Postdoctoral Fellow

Research Interest: Joshua Tucker specializes in popular musics of Latin America. Since 1999, Dr. Tucker has studied popular music in Peru, both in the Andean city of Ayacucho and among migrant groups in Lima.  Focusing on media workers, including record producers, engineers, and radio DJs, his research shows how they create new publics for styles that blend traditional forms with international sounds.  He is primarily interested in the way that these activities are redrawing the dominant categories by which “Andean,” “indigenous,” and “national” subjectivities are imagined.  “Popular commercial music is not often taken seriously in Peru as a site for redefining social norms, particularly in light of the more tangible political changes in places like Bolivia and Ecuador,” Dr. Tucker said.  “But in contemporary Lima, popular culture is probably the most dynamic force reshaping racial and ethnic ideologies.”