Cynthia's career in education began in Peru, as an advocate for working children who were an average of 2-5 years behind in traditional schooling. For the past two decades, Cynthia has worked in diverse school environments throughout New Orleans, most recently through Tulane SOPA's PreK-12 Education Programs. Before Tulane, Cynthia taught Social Studies and English Language Arts at Ecole Bilingue de la Nouvelle-Orléans, where she led study abroad trips to Martinique and France, and Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies as a Professor of Practice at Loyola University. At Warren Easton High School, Cynthia led a cultural exchange program to Peru, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. In 2017, she was selected as one of ten educators from across the country as a Harvard University Globalizing the Classroom teaching fellow. In addition to her career as an educator, Cynthia worked in Washington, DC as Director of Advocacy and Community Relations for the DC Immigrant Coalition and as After School Programs Director at Casa del Pueblo Community Program.

Megan Flattley has a PhD in Latin American Studies and Art History. Her research looks at the artistic influence and exchange between Mexican and Soviet artists in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the application of montage theory by artists in Mexico. At Tulane, she has helped to curate exhibitions in the Latin American Library as well as at the Newcomb Art Museum which included the exhibition, “Beyond the Canvas: Contemporary Art from Puerto Rico,” as well as “Per(sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana.” From 2018-2020, Megan was a Mellon Fellow for Community Engaged Scholarship.

Maisoon Fillo earned her M.A. in Latin American Studies at the Stone Center in August 2019. She also graduated in 2015 with her bachelors in Psychology and Hispanic Studies at The College of William and Mary. She studied abroad in La Plata, Argentina to learn more about the legal, political, social and psychological dimensions of Argentina's dictatorship. During her scholarship in Argentina she interned with La Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, working closely with the high school outreach program, Jóvenes y Memoria. After graduating from William and Mary, Maisoon spent the summer in Vermont studying Spanish at Middlebury Language Schools. Shortly following Middlebury's language immersion program, she taught English at La Universidad de Cesar Vallejo in Lima, Peru. These opportunities of global citizenship led to an internship with the Inter-American Dialogue's Education Program in 2016. Through the Stone Center, she has been awarded two FLAS fellowships for the study of Brazilian Portuguese; these included a two-year language program and a summer immersive program in São Paulo, Brazil. Maisoon's graduate research concerned the subject of transitional justice through the Afro-Brazilian lens.

I was born in South Carolina and grew up in Clemson, in the northwest corner of the state. My parents were both academics and my father served as dean at Clemson University. I spent a year in Brazil as a Rotary Exchange student when I was 17, and this experience ignited my interest in Latin America and international relations. I enrolled in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in August 1996, and graduated in 1999 after studying abroad in Morocco and the UK. After Georgetown, I spent a year working in Denver with the National Civilian Community Corps, as a year of Americorps service. I then moved to California in 2001 and worked in Stanford University’s Overseas Studies Program. In 2002 I enrolled in a Master’s Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Transatlantic Master’s Program involved study of the European Union and European politics. As part of this program, I spent most of 2003 at the University of Bath. After completing my Master’s thesis on the Celtic Tiger phenomenon, I returned to Chapel Hill in the fall 2004 to pursue a doctorate in political science. My dissertation field research took me back to Brazil many times in 2008 and 2009. I moved to New Orleans to complete my dissertation writing, as my wife was granted a scholarship at Tulane law school. While writing, I worked as an adjunct and Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane. I defended my dissertation in summer 2011, and started as a tenure-track assistant professor at Tulane that fall.

As an assistant professor at Tulane, I wrote papers and conducted research on foreign direct investment in developing countries, particularly Latin America. I also received grants to study investment patterns in Ireland, which ultimately became a case study chapter in my book. I have used other grants to advance my research on the determinants of innovation-intensive investment in emerging economies. I am currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane, having received tenure in July 2018. I am involved with the various political economy groups at Tulane, and I enjoy working with the Stone Center.

My research so far has resulted in a book that was published by MIT Press in 2017 (Globalizing Innovation: State Institutions and Foreign Direct Investment in Emerging Economies) and in various journal articles and book chapters. Currently, my top research priority is to execute a book project on monetary politics in late 19th century/early 20th century America, along with a number of articles on the domestic politics of monetary regimes. However, I also have long-term research agendas including a political economy treatment on the role of the United States in Central America.

While my research interests go beyond Latin America, I began my scholarly career as a Latin Americanist and feel comfortable working on Latin American political economy issues. I have published works on foreign investment in Latin America, in such outlets as Latin American Politics and Society, Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, and others.

I am a microeconomist with a strong interest in Latin America. I grew up in Uruguay and I am bi-lingual in Spanish and English and I speak Portuguese fluently. My academic degrees include B.S., F.S from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and an M.A., Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland. I have over 30 years of hands-on field experience in the region but I have devoted most of my time to academic research.

As a microeconomist, my interest centers on understanding how the complex web of incentives which forms the economic universe people live in affects their behavior. I am especially interested in finding instances where existing policies are having unintended effects that worsen poverty or prolong the transition out of it. All too often parts of this incentive-web, with strong motivational effects, are discovered to have been spun involuntarily as by-products of well-meaning policies that may have altogether unrelated purposes. For instance, a 12-year education curriculum may be divided into 3, 4-year segments instead of 2, 6-year segments, in order to focus on early education. Or primary school coverage may be expanded to include a country’s most isolated rural areas. But my work has shown that splitting an educational system into 3 equal segments can cause poor parents to pull their children out of school after 4 years of schooling instead of after 6. Similarly, my work on the Maya of Guatemala has shown that the expansion of school coverage to “under-served minorities” is the strongest force currently contributing to the disappearance of Mayan as a mother tongue; the school expansion policy may end up extinguishing the very cultures that were to be served by the expansion.

A substantial portion of my work in the region concerns various aspects of the nexus between education and poverty. This includes several papers on delayed school entry and school attainment. I have also worked extensively—both in research and in applied work commissioned by governments in the region—on the impact of school quality on adult wages and labor market performance, on teacher absenteeism, teacher wages, on differentials in public school quality across economic strata, and on the role of formal public education in the extinction of indigenous cultures.

My work also deals with other aspects of the economic environment of the Latin American poor. In two papers with co-author Christian Langpap we explore energy use in the region and its consequences for the poor. Bio-fuels are the major source of energy use for the poor throughout the world and a major contributor to the accumulation of greenhouse gasses and global warming. In Latin America, bio-fuel means firewood and firewood-based charcoal. The rate of deforestation in the region is alarming and well-known. Less well-known is that the major cause of this deforestation is not major commercial cutting for timber, but small-scale harvesting for firewood. This wood fuel is used mainly by the poor, and mostly by the urban poor—not just the rural poor. In one paper, we use Guatemalan data to document the level of firewood use and show that the firewood use problem is quite complex. Firewood is often used by people who have easy access to gas. In fact a high proportion of wood-users also own gas-burning stoves. We therefore go on to examine the cost and effect on wood-use of various policy alternatives—like subsidizing gas, providing credit to purchase a gas stove, or subsidizing gas stoves. In a companion paper that was published several years later, we show that—in addition to its effects on deforestation and global warming ‘€“firewood use has very serious detrimental health effects that are concentrated on women and young children.

My current research on the region explores two new aspects of economics for the poor. In one, I am examining domestic service. The story of economic development—with its transition from rural-based agricultural production to urban-based industry and services and sub-theme of rural-urban migration—is mainly a story about men. My current work focuses on the role of domestic service in ushering women through the great economic transformation of society.

The second topic I am currently working on concerns financial exclusion. In a modern economy, the ability to participate in financial markets—by borrowing and investing or by saving—plays a central role in the lives of wealthy people. The poor face interest rates so low on their savings and rates so high if they want to borrow, that their participation in formal financial markets is essentially nil. Ethnic minorities and women may be excluded outright. I am devising a mechanism that will help bridge the financial exclusion gap and self-select the financially excluded at a very low administrative cost.

My research is primarily devoted to modern Brazilian literary and cultural studies with a particular focus on the period of military rule between 1964 and 1985. I have developed a multidisciplinary approach, involving the analysis of literary texts, visual culture, cinema, and especially popular music, a field of heightened symbolic value in Brazilian cultural history.

My first book Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture was the first English-language treatment of Tropicália, widely acknowledged as the most important Brazilian cultural movement of the last half century. I situated the tropicalist movement in relation to an avant-garde tradition going back to Oswald de Andrade’s antropofagia (i.e. cultural cannibalism) of the late 1920s, which proposed a radical critique of the conservative legacy of Portuguese colonialism, while articulating a will to “devour” cultural practices and ideas from Europe and the United States. With manifestations in visual/conceptual art, cinema, theater, literature, and popular music, Tropicália erupted in 1968, a watershed year in culture and politics in several national contexts. It coincided with mass protests and the emergence of an armed opposition movement, which gave rise to a fiercely anti-communist hard line faction within the regime that remained in power until the mid-1970s. The military regime followed a program of conservative modernization, which stimulated capitalist growth, industrialization, and the expansion of mass media, while restricting labor demands and political rights, thereby further exacerbating social inequalities. In artworks, songs, films, and plays, the tropicalists produced elaborate allegories of Brazilian society that focused on the stark contradiction between modernity and underdevelopment in the context of authoritarian rule. Despite its brevity, Tropicália would have a deep and lasting impact on several artistic realms and would serve in subsequent years as a point of reference for the youth counterculture in Brazil.

With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2013-14), I completed my second book, Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil, which is a logical extension of Brutality Garden. While my first book focused on a small group of artists in the late 1960s, my second book examines the Brazilian counterculture from a wider angle as both a social as well as cultural movement during the 1970s. While scholarship on Latin America during the Cold War has traditionally focused on revolutionary insurgency and state-sponsored counterinsurgency, Contracultura examines other dimensions of social dissent and artistic experimentation characterized as “alternative,” “marginal,” or “underground” during this period. Drawing on a diverse corpus of source material, including literary texts (poems, experimental prose, short fiction), songs, films, artworks, photographs, cartoons, police records, censorship files, and alternative journalism, my book explores the impact of the counterculture on alternative lifestyles, the artistic avant-garde, and popular culture. The second half of the book explores the relationship between the counterculture and emergent social movements that would challenge conservative attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and race. One chapter focuses on “Black Rio,” an Afro-Brazilian urban counterculture revolving around soul music that was heavily influenced by post-Civil Rights Black Power movements in the US, which was a harbinger of an organized black political mobilization toward the end of the 1970s. Another chapter reveals the connections between the counterculture and an emergent gay movement that sought to challenge the patriarchal values and sexual mores promoted by the regime and its allies. Contracultura received an Honorable Mention, 2017 Brazil Section Award from the Latin American Studies Association and was Co-Winner of the 2017 Roberto Reis Book Award from the Brazilian Studies Association.

In addition to my monographs on cultural and social movements during the period of authoritarian rule, I have co-edited two volumes of scholarly essays related to Brazilian popular music, an artistic field that has for long interested literary scholars and cultural historians. The first volume, Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, co-edited with Charles Perrone, addressed a diverse range of topics, including Carmen Miranda’s reception in the US, the impact of bossa nova on jazz, Tropicália and psychedelic rock, Brazilian heavy metal, and Afro-Diasporic genres, such as reggae and funk. The second volume, Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship, co-edited with Idelber Avelar, examined music as a resource for claiming social, political, and cultural rights in Brazil. These essays consider Brazilian popular music in relation to national identity, social class, race, political protest, and forms of distribution and consumption. My own contribution to this volume examined the discourse around citizenship in the work of Tom Zé (Antonio José Santana Martins, b. 1936), a participant in the tropicalist movement who has reflected on the meaning of modern citizenship in Brazil throughout his career spanning over half a century.

The remarkable career of Tom Zé is the focus of my current book project, Stray Dog in the Milky Way: Tom Zé and Brazilian Popular Music. While focused on one artist, this project will tell a larger story with a longer narrative arc about modernity, migration, citizenship, and culture in Brazil.

I was born in Bulgaria and grew up in Varna, a resort town and a large port on the Black Sea. After graduating from the English Language High School in Varna in 1994, I came to the United States to pursue a bachelor’s degree at Franklin and Marshall College. In 1998, I graduated from Franklin and Marshall College with a double major in Government and French and a minor in Asian Studies. After Franklin and Marshall, I moved to Stanford in September 1998 to pursue a PhD in Political Science. My dissertation field research took me to China (where I spent 18 months taking advanced Chinese and conducting fieldwork in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong), Taiwan, Russia, the Czech Republic, and France. I completed my dissertation in the fall of 2003 (my PhD was conferred in March 2004) and spent Spring 2004 on a post-doctoral fellowship at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.

In July 2004, I moved to Dartmouth College to begin a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of Government. During my years at Dartmouth, my research was supported through an An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Research at Harvard (2005-2006) and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2010-2011). In July 2011, I accepted a tenured appointment as Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. After moving to Tulane, I was appointed Distinguished Guest Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (August-December 2011) and received a Berlin Prize, which allowed me to spend January-June 2012 as an Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2011-2013, I was also a member of a cohort of twenty young China scholars selected by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations to participate in the Public Intellectuals Program. I received visiting fellowships from the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki (which allowed me to spend August 2013, May-June 2014, and May 2016 in Finland) and a fellowship from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, which made it possible to spend 2016-17 at Princeton. I have used these grants to advance my research on China and on comparative authoritarianism.

Having served as Director of the Asian Studies Program in 2014-16, I am currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane. I am also a non-resident Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and Chair of the Resilience of Authoritarianism Working Group at the Holbrooke Forum for the Study of Diplomacy and Governance Statecraft in the 21st Century at the American Academy in Berlin. In addition, I currently serve as the Associate Editor for Asia of the journal Problems of Post-Communism.

My research so far has resulted in a book that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009 (Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China); in an edited volume that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 (Why Communism Did Not Collapse: Understanding Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Asia and Europe); in a book on the political logic of socialist consumption published in Bulgarian by Ciela Publishers in 2018 (Politicheskata logika na sotsialisticheskoto potreblenie); in a special issue on Media Control in China (published by Problems of Post-Communism in 2017); and in journal articles and book chapters published in English, Chinese, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and German. Currently, my top research priority is to complete a book manuscript entitled Dictatorship and Information: Autocratic Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China and two edited volumes: Popular Authoritarianism: The Quest for Regime Durability and China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance.

I am not a Latin Americanist, but I have a strong interest in Cuba, where I have conducted fieldwork in 2013 and 2015. My fascination with Cuba stems from the opportunity it offers us to think about comparative communism (this is the intellectual impetus behind China-Cuba: Trajectories of Post-Revolutionary Governance, one of the edited volumes I am currently working on) and about the tools that are used by the regime to ensure regime resilience (this led to my article “The Functions of Letters to the Editor in Reform-Era Cuba,” which is forthcoming in the Latin American Research Review in March 2019).