Spotlight on Our Members

   Publish a book recently?  An article or book chapter?  Curate an exhibit, give a live performance, or secure an external grant to help fund your ongoing scholarly work?  This page serves as a place to showcase the recent professional activities & accomplishments of our members.  If you have something to contribute, let us know!

Michael J. Schroeder, Honored in Nicaragua. Past president of MACLAS (2016-2017) and Associate Professor of History at Lebanon Valley College, Mike is “the leading U.S. authority on the historical legacy of Augusto César Sandino and a renowned expert on Latin America,” according to the Nicaraguan Academy of Geography and History, which inducted him as a corresponding member in 2017—one of only three stateside scholars currently honored with this recognition.

Mike was lauded for creating the valued site, www.SandinoRebellion.com, containing over 4,700 hitherto unpublished primary documents. This largely bilingual, expansive digital archive on Nicaraguan history during the period of U.S. military intervention in the 1920s and 1930s is an easily searchable treasure trove on topics from the air war and its “air-toons”—political cartoons and graphics, to the Atlantic Coast, Marine actions, political gangs, the National Guard, and the porous Honduran border—with a wealth of photos and illustrations. The site constitutes a major resource for new historical research, with its ample bibliography of archives, manuscript holdings, books, and articles.

Showing his strong commitment to teaching, Mike poses the question “How best to teach about Sandino and the Marines in Nicaragua?” and answers with an innovative section on curricular suggestions and materials. He foresees expanding the site with a portal to book projects to promote “reader friendly, easy to navigate chapter-by-chapter dialogues with printed books that will include photos, maps, explanatory notes and references, links to related materials, and more extended discussions of key topics.”

Recipient of the 2013 MACLAS Harold Eugene Davis “Best Article” Prize for “Social Geographies of Grievance & War,” Mike has received grants from Lebanon Valley College, as well as the Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations.

Mike is coauthor of the widely-used college textbook The Twentieth Century and Beyond (McGraw-Hill), coeditor of the seven-volume Encyclopedia of World History (Facts on File), and author of The New Immigrants: Mexican Americans (Chelsea House). He is a regular contributor to anthologies and academic journals, including the Revista de Temas Nicaragüenses, and can be seen in interviews on YouTube. Mike’s books in progress include The Sandino Rebellion: Empire-Making, Social Revolution, and Counterinsurgency in Las Segovias, Nicaragua, 1927-1934 and Los Voluntarios: A Failed Counterinsurgency Experiment of the US Marines in the Mountains of Northern Nicaragua, 1927-1932.

We applaud Michael J. Schroeder as an outstanding scholar of Latin American history and thank him for his many contributions to MACLAS as officer and member of the Executive Council and of numerous awards committees.

David M. K. Sheinin, Professor of History at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, member of the Argentine National Academy of History, and recipient of the 2013 Arthur P. Whitaker Award for his book Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians in the Dirty War (2012) has edited a collection of essays on Sports Culture in Latin American History, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2015.  To quote from a recent review in the Journal of Social History,

“This collection showcases an impressive array of scholarship that employs new and traditional sources to highlight the importance of athletes, who often find themselves at the intersection of discussions about race, gender, nation, civic identity, and public space. Seamlessly weaves national identity, gendered discourse, civic life, and ethnicity from one chapter to the next. This volume privileges the human body over organized sports and presents physicality as a connective tissue. Across eight chapters, authors imbue athletes with symbolic and social significance as mediators of longstanding dichotomies across the region. This compilation will be welcomed by Latin Americanists searching for an accessible and varied collection to use in undergraduate courses on popular culture, as well as by sports scholars seeking to deepen their breadth of coverage of sports in the Global South.”

Ted Goertzel, retired Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University, has co-authored a book with Guy Burton titled Presidential Leadership in the Americas since Independence (Lexington Books, 2016).  In the words of the promotional materials on Lexington's website,

"What is presidential leadership and why have some presidents been considered “great” – or rather “transformational” – while others are not? What are the drivers which distinguish these presidents from the rest?  Presidential Leadership in the Americas since Independence answers these questions through a systematic study of leadership across the Americas over 200 years, from independence to the present day. Having surveyed who the most cited presidents are in the Americas, Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel examine the experience of presidents from across the western hemisphere: the US, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. They study the relationship between these men and women’s actions within the constraints they faced during four political periods: independence, national consolidation during the nineteenth century, state-building from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries and neoliberalism since the 1970s-80s.  The most “transformational” presidents are found to be those who are not only able to innovate and build new political consensuses at a time of crisis, but also consolidate them so that the reforms becoming lasting – and extending beyond an individual president’s own political (even biological) lifetime."

Ana Moraña, Associate Professor of Spanish at Shippensburg University, recently published her book, La fiesta de la modernidad en la Argentina:  La revista Caras y Caretas (1898-1910)  (Buenos Aires: Editorial Corregidor 2016).  The publisher's promotional materials offer this capsule summary:

"Morana aborda en este ensayo la revista argentina Caras y Caretas a la luz de la metáfora de la fiesta en su sentido más amplio (como manifestación de alegría, como celebración nacional, como ritual de rebelión, entre varias expresiones). Se interesa además en la propaganda, como un activo llamado a esa fiesta, casi como una de las formas en que ese festejo se manifiesta, y como antesala del consumo, especialmente dirigido a una clase media emergente. Se centra además en la ciudad y la inmigración, dos focos de interés ampliamente desarrollados en los estudios latinoamericanos. Por otra parte, la autora distingue en Caras y Caretas la pasión de sus creadores por los verdaderos protagonistas de los procesos económicos, políticos o culturales, sujetos de todas las clases sociales, las razas, las condiciones sociales y las culturas, en las más variadas situaciones. Y muestra, al mismo tiempo, su fascinación por la forma en que se ve la convicción popular en la democracia. De ahí en más, todo es reclamo y desafío, buscando satisfacer el mismo deseo: el derecho a la educación, a la vivienda, a la salud, a la felicidad. Esta suma de deseos, que la democracia hace crecer en la gente, y que la masa acepta como un proyecto propio, se ve leudar a través de la revista que invita a la fiesta. Y es que, quizás, la verdadera fiesta es la de la democracia; fiesta compleja, convertida en espejismo para muchos, eterna aspiración, persecución incansable y muy a menudo fallida de la igualdad, del derecho a estar todos invitados y comer juntos en la misma bacanal."

Consuelo Hernández, Associate Professor of World Languages and Cultures at American University, recently published a book of poetry, Mi reino sin orillas  (Editorial Torremozas: Madrid, Spain, 2016), with an introduction by Chilean poet Astrid Fugellie. 

   In the words of Prof. Edith Grossman of Columbia University, "Una vez más Consuelo Hernández muestra que es una poeta prolífica y talentosa. Ha publicado varios poemarios y sus trabajos han sido incluidos en las mayores antologías y en importantes revistas literarias. Su poesía es integral, plena de su intenso lirismo, de su sensibilidad e intuición y de su aguda inteligencia. Me encantó esta colección de poemas de Mi reino sin orillas, llenos de pasión, nostalgia, y una tristeza profunda. Es un poemario hermosísimo y difícil en el sentido de que el camino emotivo que evoca es bien duro." 

   In May 2016, Prof. Hernández was invited to present her book at the University of Padua in Italy.  In September she was invited to the Festival Internacional de Poesía Ars Amandi in Panamá, and in October to The Americas Poetry Festival of New York.

Regina Root, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the College of William & Mary, longtime MACLAS member, and former MACLAS President (2009-10), has been awarded a prestigious grant of $50,400 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for her ongoing inquiry into the Tillett Tapestry, an extraordinary historical artifact described in more detail in this feature story issued by the College.  For the same project she was awarded another grant of $15,000 from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Asheville, NC.

   The centerpiece of Prof. Root's inquiries, a nearly 32-meter long tapestry created over 12 years starting in the mid-1960s by the English-born artist Leslie Tillett, depicts the events of the Conquest of Mexico from multiple and contending perspectives, offering a fascinating window on one of the most iconic, foundational, and transformative periods in Mexican history.  "El Tapiz offers us a unique opportunity to wrestle with what it means to be conquered or the conqueror," she explained, "and to understand the terms of cultural heritage and historic memory."  Her book manuscript-in-progress is expected to appear in print before 2019 — the year marking the 500th anniversary of the first year of the Conquest — and the year she hopes to embark on a traveling exhibit showcasing the Tillett Tapestry and the results of her scholarly inquiries into this magnificent embroidered mural.

   Integrating her scholarship and pedagogy, looking optimistically to the future as she digs into the past, Prof. Root envisions opportunities "for undergraduate and graduate students to get involved — that would be a wonderful thing.  I can see using this work of art as a jump-off point to read the texts that influenced post-revolutionary culture quite profoundly."