Thomas Reese has been with the Stone Center since 1999 as Executive Director. His scholarship and publications include studies of eighteenth-century Spanish art and politics, culture contact in sixteenth-century Mexico, devotional space in Colonial Andean society, and contemporary architectural practice in Europe and America. His most recent research focuses on images and identity in turn of the century Argentina and Mexico. Previous to coming to Tulane, he served as Deputy Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and taught at the University of Texas at Austin. As Executive Director, he is responsible for overseeing all academic and administrative functions of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. In addition, he also teaches courses in art history in the Art Department.

Catherine (Catie) Prechtel has a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University, with a focus in gender and sexuality studies and cultural studies in Latin America. Catie graduated with Bachelor’s degrees in Spanish and Anthropology from Pacific University in Oregon in 2014. While at Pacific University, she co-taught poetry classes for Spanish-speaking immigrant women with the nonprofit Adelante Mujeres. Upon graduating, she continued to develop her teaching skills as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, from 2014-2015, and worked as an English teacher in the city from 2015-2016. In 2018 she completed her Master’s degree in Spanish & Latin American Studies at American University in Washington, D.C.. As an undergraduate, her research focused on the formation of understandings of virginity among Mexican-American populations, and as an MA student, she explored the changing significance of the figure of La Catrina in the works of Mexican artists José Guadalupe Posada and Diego Rivera. For her PhD dissertation, she explored how Mexican exótico wrestlers perform gender and sexual identities within lucha libre. During the 2021-2022 academic year she conducted her research as a visiting investigator affiliated with the CIEG (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género) at UNAM in Mexico City.

My research explores how the interactions between media and political systems affect processes of democratization, with a focus on Brazil. My Ph.D. dissertation, which resulted in my first book (Televisão e política no Brasil: A Rede Globo e as interpretações da audiencia, E-Papers, 2007), analyzes the reception and impact of television news and telenovelas on viewers’ interpretations of political issues in Brazil. In 2002, I received the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award by the Brazilian Society of Interdisciplinary Communication Studies (INTERCOM). Since then, my research has explored a variety of communication practices and genres, including journalism, television fiction, political advertising, public health campaigns, and social media. My second book (Media power and democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the dilemmas of political accountability, Routledge, 2012) analyzes the role of TV Globo, Brazil’s largest media conglomerate, in the first two decades of the country’s process of democratization (1985-2006). Based on content analysis of television news and telenovelas, as well as on interviews with key political actors, including four former presidents, the book explores how the interactions between television, democratization, and civil society mobilization have shaped the quality of political accountability in Brazil. My work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Journalism, Media, Culture and Society, Political Communication, and Television and New Media.

Between January 2011 and July 2013, I worked as Program Officer for Media Rights and Access at the Ford Foundation office in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In that capacity, I oversaw a portfolio of grants that supported civil society groups and other organizations working on media reform and freedom of expression in Brazil.

My current research and book project analyze the role of the media in the process of democratic decay that Brazil has experienced since 2013. More specifically, I look at the role of communication processes in the rise of the far-right, which culminated in the election of President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. My analysis looks at how a significant middle-class mobilization emerged in opposition to the process of social inclusion that took place in the first decade of the 21st Century, when Brazil experienced a significant decline in poverty and social inequality levels. Based on the analysis of mainstream media representations about race, gender, and class, I argue that stigmatizing representations of groups that had been partially incorporated (the so-called “new middle class”) are central to understand Brazil’s contemporary shift to the right. Such representations have contributed to strengthen middle-class resentment about the process of social inclusion and have fostered the rise of a new conservative movement.

Erika Pettersen graduated in May 2020 with a Master’s degree from the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Prior to her studies at Tulane, she earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Amherst College and a certificate in Arts & Culture Strategy from the University of Pennsylvania. She has also completed post baccalaureate coursework in Studio Art & Art History at Brooklyn College. Erika’s diverse educational pursuits have informed her work as a photographer, curator, and arts administrator with a wide range of New York City-based organizations and independent artists.

Analyzing media, literature, and material culture related to Mexican mestizaje, Erika’s research at the Stone Center has focused on concepts of identity and belonging through the lenses of race and gender. Alongside her academic work, Erika served as President of the Latin Americanist Graduate Organization (LAGO) and coordinated the first LAGO Symposium on Community-Engaged Scholarship in February 2020. On April 15th, 2020, she defended her thesis, entitled “The Image of la india in Oaxaca, Mexico: Forging Afro-descendant Visibility and Trans -modern Indigeneity at the 2019 Guelaguetza,” with distinction.