What can a photograph tell us about the commercialization of race and media in 19th-century Latin America? By tracing the image’s journey as it got copied, distorted, inverted, and captioned, this talk analyzes why this specific photo became a transnational and transatlantic object of fascination.   

Sponsored by the Latin American Library and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Tulane University

The musical documentary "Luiz Melodia - Within the Heart of Brazil", narrated entirely in the first person, seeks to give voice to the artist Luiz Melodia, who, by embracing his musical freedom and originality, challenged many norms in the Brazilian music and cultural market. Sculpted with rare and unpublished archive images, it reflects the cultural importance of his legacy and the music scene to which he actively contributed from the 1970s onwards.

Professor Johnson’s talk is drawn from her award-winning book Encyclopédie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2023) which documents the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. The book combines traditional academic chapters and experimental forms in its use of archival fragments and visual culture to tell the stories of the free people of color and enslaved women and men who enabled Moreau’s work.

This presentation will explore how political polarization shapes judicial behavior in Argentina’s federal corruption investigations. Drawing on data from Comodoro Py, the nation’s most prominent federal courthouse, this presentation examines how partisan bias influences prosecutorial decisions. Leveraging the random assignment of cases to courts, we reveal that prosecutors appointed by different presidents disproportionately shield partisan allies and target opposition members.

As part of the 2025 Tulane Maya Symposium, the Mexican Cultural Institute in New Orleans, M.A.R.I., and the New Orleans Hispanic Heritage Foundation will host a talk by Pilar Regueiro Suárez and the exhibition opening of William De Leftwich Dodge's "Hues of Archaeology: W.L. Dodge's Journey through Ancient Mexico." The event is free and open to the public.

The project analyzes how the interactions and displacements of periodicals, newspapers, manuscript books, and their authors and agents, configured systematic translinguistic, transcolonial and transimperial connections and networks that contributed to the development of trans-Caribbean histories of enlightened criticism in the Spanish-speaking, English-speaking and French-speaking Caribbean between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

Join the Middle American Research Institute for the 19th Annual Maya Symposium at Tulane University, featuring workshops, exhibitions, and presentations by distinguished scholars of Maya archaeology and epigraphy.

Read the program here

Join the weekly Spanish language meet-up! Participants will have the opportunity to engage in Spanish conversation with other individuals. We will have different snacks from all over Latin America every week.