Jamie Giunta is a graduate of the Latin American Studies MA program. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia with a BA in Romance Languages (Portuguese and Spanish). She spent one year in Brazil with the Portuguese Flagship Program studying at the Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei and working at a multinational company in São Paulo. Her research interests include Portuguese and Brazilian literature, postcolonial studies, and Japanese immigration in Brazil. After completing her master's degree, Jamie plans to apply to the Fulbright program and then continue her education in a Latin American Studies or Spanish and Portuguese Ph.D. program.

Currently a local presence in the New Orleans music scene, award-winning composer and educator Geovane Paiva Santos, is a native Brazilian from the city of Belo Horizonte. Santos holds a B.M. in Music Performance from the Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais (UEMG), majoring in both Classical Guitar and Music Education (2011). While still associated with UEMG, Santos received a fellowship from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to conduct musicological archival research and restoration work of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Minas Gerais’ mestizo classical music, a.k.a Barroco Mineiro (2010-2014).

Aligning his academic pursuits with a rising professional music career in jazz and Brazilian popular music in the U.S., Santos went on to receive an M.A. in Jazz Studies from the University of New Orleans (2018). His masters’ thesis entitled “Bossa Nova is not snapped on 2 and 4” was a study of music through a language accent framework where he analyzed and compared celebrated versions of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s composition Chega de Saudade (U.S. and Brazilian charts and recordings) highlighting the ways in which U.S. musicians mistranscribed, mistranslated and erased the Brazilian “accent” through Americanization/jazzification/cultural appropriation as they proliferated Jobim’s work around the world.

At Tulane University, beyond his enrolment as a Ph.D. student in the Latin American Studies program, Santos is also a community-engaged scholar and a Mellon Foundation fellow. His community-engaged scholarship focuses on developing a project to transcribe New Orleans native, master percussionist, and U.S. Afro-Brazilian cultural ambassador Curtis Pierre’s empirical knowledge into method books to create popular education tools. Santos’ doctoral research aims to expand and further explore his work in music mistranslations through interdisciplinarity, in other words, he is working out methodologies in which song titles, lyrical content, sheet music, and recorded performances can become gateways for critical analysis of symbolic aspects of music that surpass music theory. This way he uses bossa nova songs, and 1950-1960s developmentalist rhetoric as primary sources to discuss race, class, history, imperialism, and cultural appropriation, discussing how Brazil’s marketing and branding bossa nova as a white Brazilian music genre negatively affected how the non-Brazilian world still hears and plays bossa nova today.

Lauren Romaguera has a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies. As a Miami native and daughter of Cuban exiles, she has been surrounded by Latin culture all her life and feels personally invested in transnationalism, issues of social justice, migration, and the identity politics of marginalized communities. She earned her B.A. in Literature in 2013 from Florida International University, where she explored parallel themes of the exilic experience. She began teaching Philosophy at a middle school soon after and implored her students to think critically and be active members of society. She completed her Master’s degree in Literature, as she worked as a graduate instructor teaching classes on Composition/Rhetoric and Social Justice. Her thesis, entitled “Identification Through Movement: Dance as the Embodied Archive of Memory, History, and Cultural Identity,” explores dance as a conduit of history, supplying multiple tellings of history and historiography. During her graduate career she was an active member of many university and community projects. She co-founded and ran the Sanctuary Campus division of her university, was nominated Vice President of the Women’s Studies Organization, and was a research volunteer for the Cuban Research Institution. For her doctoral research she seeks to further problematize hegemonic tellings of history through the performativity of cultural memory in a Caribbean context.

I am an economist that studies Latin American growth and development. In particular, I have recently been studying how public policy related to public infrastructure investment affects the distribution of wealth and income in Mexico and Paraguay. When governments build more roads, highways, and water systems, how are households in various quintiles of the income distribution affected? Along with my co-authors on several published journal articles on this topic, we have found that the answers depend on how infrastructure investment is financed (by income taxes, by consumption taxes, by government borrowing, etc.). We generally find that poorer households may benefit significantly in terms of income and welfare, but that richer households may also benefit, in some cases, comparatively by even more.

In previous published research, I have also analyzed the effects of public infrastructure on aggregate economic growth in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. I had found that there is a positive effect, but this positive effect may diminish and even turn negative with excessive investment. All the Latin American countries mentioned were well below the threshold, so improving their infrastructure would lead to higher growth rates.

I have also written on the effects of the financial system on growth, poverty reduction and inequality in Latin America. As the banking and financial system was expanded in Latin America, in some countries to a larger degree than in others, those countries grew. Some of the middle income quintiles benefited, but not the poorest which lacked access to the banking and other financial services. Hence, access to financial services is a key issue for the poorest households in the region. Related to this, I am more recently working on how micro finance institutions fulfill dual objectives of profit and social outreach.

For many years, I served as the director of the PhD and masters programs in economics at my previous institution, Georgia State University. I teach a seminar course on Latin American development, as well as macroeconomics and global economics courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels.