The Department of History offers a wide variety of undergraduate courses in Latin American history and is now embarked on building a first-rate Ph.D. program in this field.  Two more scholars in Latin American History have recently been added to the faculty, and we now have four colleagues who focus their work on Latin America.  In addition, a fifth historian has an appointment in the School of International and Area Studies and a sixth, trained as a historical geographer, has an adjunct appointment in the History Department and is a member of the Geography Department.  The Department is interested in recruiting Ph.D. students to this field and can offer excellent travel and research support for those who join the program.

Faculty

James Cane-Carrasco: (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley)
Professor Cane-Carrasco is a scholar of Latin America who specializes on the history of Argentina. His new book, The Fourth Enemy: Journalism and Power in the Making of Peronist Argentina, 1930-1955, will appear this year with Pennsylvania State University Press. Other recent publications include "`Trabajadores de la pluma: Periodistas, propietarios y estado en la tranformacion de la prensa argentina, 1935-1945" which is chapter one in Liliana Da Orden y Julio Cesar Melon Pirro (eds), Prensa y peronismo. Discursos, practicas, empresas (1943-1958). He has presented his work at professional conferences, including new research on the reception of Marx in Latin America, and he has served as the president of Chile/Rio de la Plata Committee of the Conference on Latin American History. His teaching has ranged from "Experiences of Socialism in the Twentieth-Century World" to a team-taught course called "Cultural Revolutions in the 1960s" to surveys of Hispanic America to "Mass Movements in Twentieth-Century South America."

Sterling Evans: (Ph.D., University of Kansas)
Dr. Evans will join the History faculty in January, 2009 in the newly endowed Welsh Chair.  He has research and teaching interests in the history of the trans-national Great Plains, the U.S-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian borderlands, agricultural history, and environmental history.  These interests meet in his book Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, which won the Theodore Saloutos Best Book Prize from the Agricultural History Society in 2008.  He also edited the books The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on Regional History of the 49th Parallel and American Indians in American History, 1870-2001: A Companion Reader, and is the author of a number of articles in a variety of journals.  He is active in such organizations as the Western History Association, the Agricultural History Society, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Environmental History.  His interest in the environmental history of Latin America prompted him to write The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica, and to work on his current project, Damming Sonora: Water, Agriculture, and Environmental Change in Northwest Mexico.  Evans received his doctorate in history from the University of Kansas.

Raphael Folsom: (Ph.D., Yale University)
Professor Folsom will spend academic year 2008-2009 on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Clements Center at Southern Methodist University where he will be working on a book exploring the complex relationship between Yaqui Indians and invading Spanish imperial forces in colonial Mexico. In the face of Spanish conquest, his monograph examines how Yaquis managed to establish a sphere of cultural autonomy in the colonial northwest via a mix of political shrewdness and violence. He has an article under review and has presented his research at several conferences. Professor Folsom's course offerings include Spain in America and surveys of colonial Latin America.

Terry Rugeley: (Ph.D., University of Houston)
Professor Rugeley is a Presidential Professor who recently received the Regents Award for Superior Research. He has published four books since 1996, including his recent translation of an Austrian botanist's German-language memoir of travel in nineteenth-century Mexico. His monographs explore many of the intricacies of nineteenth-century Latin American culture--religion, popular culture, ethnic conflict, and the problem of violence figure all prominently in his work and his forthcoming book, Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and Caste War Violence in Yucatan, 1800-1880, continues his explorations of these complex themes. Professor Rugeley is a past president of the Southwest Council of Latin American Studies and offers a wide variety of courses on Latin American history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and serves as Director of Graduate Studies.