The Middle American Research Institute is happy to announce the eight talk of the 2017-2018 Brown Bag talk series. Dr. Jessica J. Price, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy & Research, Tulane University, will present her research in a talk entitled We Will Not Be Quiet: The Dynamics of Protest in Indigenous Mexico.

Finish out Black History Month with a tragic look at the Middle Passage through the poetry of Castro Alves. We will read the poem in its original Portuguese and provide a translation. Indulge in cocadas, small coconut sweets (akin to pralines), representative of the sugar boom economy that relied on slave labor.

For more information please contact mloveles@tulane.edu or adderley@tulane.edu.

Check out a flyer for the event here and join us afterwards for a Bate Papo!

Steven Levitsky is Professor of Government at Harvard University. His research interests include political parties, authoritarianism and democratization, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America.

Join Pamela Neumann as she hosts a workshop on her paper, ‘The Social Construction of Women‘s Ambivalence in Nicaragua.”

Please join us for a work-in-progress talk titled “Congresos de la Cultura Negra de las Américas (1977, 1980, 1982): Contradicciones y resignificaciones en el campo conceptual de las negritudes y su impacto en la creación y la crítica literaria y artística,” by Silvia Valero, 2017-2018 Richard E. Greenleaf Fellow at the Latin American Library. The talk will be in Spanish and all will be invited for refreshments afterwards. Abstracts for the lecture in both Spanish and English below.

Daniel Fridman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Texas, Austin. Professor Fridman will present research from his recently published Freedom from Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2016). Freedom from Work analyzes how people in the US and Argentina are taught to think about themselves as economic actors today. The author follows groups of fans of financial success best-sellers and associated practices, like seminars, and even a board game.

Join Dr. Kent Eaton from the Political Science Department at University of California at Santa Cruz as he gives a lecture titled: “Territory and Ideology in Latin America.” This talk will examine territorial conflicts in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru over economic policy during the commodity boom in the early 21st century. Please RSVP to cipr@tulane.edu.

Join us at the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library for a hands-on workshop that will introduce attendees to the painted divinatory screenfolds produced and used by ancient Mexican and Maya priest-scribes. Attendees will have the opportunity to explore screenfold contents via the Maya Hieroglyphic Codices Online Database. We will look specifically at the mythology, iconography, texts, and calendrics related to natural and mythological disasters. In the first hour the workshop will cover some of the basics of hieroglyphic writing, time-reckoning, and astronomy.

Join us for a special photographic exhibition in collaboration with the Middle American Research Institute at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Tulane University. As part of the 2018 Tulane University Maya Symposium, the Consulate of Mexico and the Mexican Cultural Institute will host a photographic exhibition in collaboration with the Middle American Research Institute of Tulane. The exhibition will present the collections of the Archaeology Department of Tulane University, showing the process of discovering the Maya world.

The Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University is pleased to host the 65th Annual Meeting of SECOLAS in Nashville, Tennessee from Thursday, March 8 to Sunday, March 11, 2018. SECOLAS invites faculty members, independent scholars, and students to submit panel and individual paper proposals for participation in the conference.

After the conference, all presenters will be eligible to submit their paper for publication consideration in the SECOLAS Annals issue of The Latin Americanist, an international, peer-reviewed journal published by SECOLAS and Wiley Blackwell.