Bethany Beachum graduated from the Stone Center's M.A. Program in Latin American Studies in May 2020. She earned her B.A. in International Development Studies from Calvin College in 2011 and upon graduating, moved to Managua, Nicaragua for five years where she worked with an international NGO that supports rural food security and public health organizations. While in Nicaragua, she also earned a graduate certificate in Food Security and Adaptation to Climate Change from the Universidad Centroamericana. After returning to the U.S., she worked in several nonprofit roles, including as a regional consultant for the Central America programs of a Washington D.C.-based NGO. While at the Stone Center, she focused her thesis research on studying the power dynamics in funding relationships between international donor organizations and national-level NGOs in Guatemala. Post-graduation, Bethany plans to continue working in the civil society sector in a grants management role with a local New Orleans nonprofit.

I am a cultural anthropologist with a long-term focus on the peoples, societies, and landscapes of the Amazon River region. Before joining the faculty at Tulane in 1991, I held appointments at the New York Botanical Garden and the Goeldi Museum (Brazil). My first scholarly monograph on the Amazon, Footprints of the Forest; Ka’apor Ethnobotany: The Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People (Columbia University Press, 1994) and my second one, Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and their Landscapes (University of Alabama Press, 2013), received the Mary W. Klinger Book Award from the Society for Economic Botany. The late Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands appointed me Officer of the Order of the Golden Ark (a Dutch conservation merit order) in 1993. I have worked to help establish historical ecology as a research program. I have had an interdisciplinary outlook, in fact, since the beginning of my career. My postdoctoral field research has been supported by extramural grants, including from Fulbright, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Edward John Noble Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defense Fund, and National Geographic Society. I was honored to receive in 2016 the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching. I have given guest lectures at numerous scholarly venues in the United States and around the world, including Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, Ireland, England, Sweden, Spain, France, and Germany. My research has been mostly noted in the fields of archaeology, ecology, and ethnobiology. Recently I have done fieldwork with indigenous groups and forest peasants exhibiting traditional lifestyles in tropical forests of Malaysia, Ecuador, and Brazil, and I have studied their historical and contemporary engagements with the flora and fauna of their landscapes. My most recent research as of 2019 specifically concerns the Waorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where with colleagues from IKIAM (the Ecuadorian university in Tena, Ecuador) and ASU and support as P.I. from a National Geographic Society grant, I have been engaged in studying and describing an anthropogenic forest managed by forebears of the current Wao people. In 2019 I became a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. I am using the research time freed up by that fellowship to work on a new book concerning the Lower Amazon.

My teaching emphasizes the specific areas where I do research, topically and geographically.

I teach courses in historical ecology of Amazonia, South American ethnology, environmental anthropology, ethnographic methods, and cultural anthropology. As to this last course, my textbook Inside Cultures (2016), which is an introduction to cultural anthropology, is in its second edition with Routledge. My graduate advising and mentoring are in related areas of these specialty interests. I have thus far supervised ten dissertations at Tulane, with five more in the pipeline. I also advise undergraduate majors in anthropology and occasionally environmental studies.

In terms of department and university service, I served as chair of anthropology for a three-year term (1998-2001) and first director in SLA of the new Environmental Studies Program and its associated major (2007-2010). I have served on many dissertation, MA, and undergraduate honors committees, department committees, and college and university committees, including a term in the university Senate.

In terms of professional service, I was editor of the Journal of Ethnobiology (1998-2001) and President-elect (2011-13) and President (2013-15) of the Society of Ethnobiology. I am one of the founders of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) and its associated journal, Tipiti, its first Secretary-Treasurer, and second President (2002-2005). I am also lifetime member of that society. I am currently coeditor of the New Frontiers in Historical Ecology series at Routledge and serve on the editorial boards of Human Ecology, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi (Ciencias Humanas), and Révue d’Ethnoécologie.

Melissa Bailes is an associate professor of English specializing in British literature of the long eighteenth century (1660-1830), transatlantic and transnational studies, and the history of science.  She has written articles and book chapters focusing on the Caribbean as well as Latin and South America.  She especially works on ideas about gender and colonialism as they relate to literature and the environment.  Her first book, Questioning Nature: British Women’s Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830 (U Virginia P), won the 2017 Book Prize from the British Society for Literature and Science.  Her second book, Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750-1830, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2023.  Bailes's research has been supported by long-term fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the American Association of University Women, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

My books and scholarly articles encompass a relatively wide range of countries and periods in Latin America, but they are all devoted to the intersection of literature, culture, and politics, with a focus on how rhetorical structures constitute and are constituted by political processes.

My first book, The untimely present: postdictatorial Latin American fiction and the task of mourning (Duke UP, 1999), discussed how the literatures of postdictatorial Chile, Argentina, and Brazil addressed the task of mourning following the military regimes of the 1960s-80s. The untimely present argued that postdictatorial Latin American societies produced a particular sort of literature and culture, marked by the imperative to mourn and to bury the persons and ideals killed by the military regimes. The book analyzed novels published by Argentineans Ricardo Piglia and Tununa Mercado, Chilean Diamela Eltit, and Brazilians Silviano Santiago and João Gilberto Noll. It helped establish the subfield of postdictatorship studies, won the Modern Language Association Kovacs award, and was published in Chilean and Brazilian editions: Alegorías de la derrota: la ficción posdictatorial y el trabajo del duelo en América Latina (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000) and Alegorias da derrota: aficção pós-ditatorial e o trabalho do luto na América Latina (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2003).

My second book, The letter of violence: essays on ethics, narrative, and politics (Palgrave, 2004), was also published in augmented Brazilian and Chilean editions, respectively in 2012 (Belo Horizonte: UFMG) and 2016 (Santiago: Palinodia). The letter of violence explored intersections of the representation of extreme violence in literature and in critical theory. It engaged Jacques Derrida’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s “For a critique of violence” in his Force of Law, in a chapter that has been lauded by luminaries such as Judith Butler and Andrew Benjamin as a pertinent critique of Derrida and an important contribution to the legacy of Benjamin’s essay. The letter of violence also offered an interpretation of Jorge Luis Borges’s “El etnógrafo”, his spoof on anthropology, in which I argued that in Borges’ story ethics is presented as leading ultimately to the undermining of the discipline. The book also engaged representations of torture in Southern Cone literature (Ariel Dorfman, Mario Benedetti) in the light of Foucauldian Page DuBois’s work Torture and Truth, which convincingly argued that the very invention of the concept of truth in Ancient Greece was bound with the assumption that slaves can be tortured in the court of law and will necessarily be truthful when tortured.

The Latin American editions of The letter of violence are considerably expanded and include two chapters on violence and nationhoood in Brazilian popular music, in Minas Gerais and world-renowned heavy metal band Sepultura and in the Pernambucan, Northeastern movement mangue beat. The book argued that heavy metal became increasingly associated with the political emancipation that acoustic MPB (música popular brasileira) once symbolized and was no longer able to sustain in the 1980s. The chapter on the Northeastern movement chronicled how mangue beat bridged the earlier separation of national and youth musics in Brazil by mixing international genres that were not part of the mainstream pop/rock canon (reggae, hip hop, raggamuffin’, heavy metal) and regional genres alien to the canon of Brazilian popular music (coco, embolada, maracatu, baião). My interest in music has also yielded an essay on 19th century music such as represented by Brazilian giant Machado de Assis, which won the first Itamaraty (Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations) essay contest and has since been reprinted in the commemorative volume and in various languages. In addition, my work on music has included a volume coedited with Christopher Dunn for Duke University Press and entitled Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship. Our introduction maps the history of relations between citizenship and music in Brazil and has since become part of illustrious collections such as David Byrne’s.

My two most recent books are Transculturación en suspenso: Los orígenes de los cánones narrativos colombianos (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 2015) and Crônicas do estado de exceção (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Azougue, 2014). Both volumes expand on my interest in culture and politics. The first is a short, 150-page opuscule on the origins of the regional canons of the Colombian novel. Colombia is the only South American country that did not constitute itself in unified fashion in the 19th-century and the book analyzes the separate processes that took place in the Caribbean, in the Cauca Valley, in Antioquia, and in the central-eastern region that encompasses Bogotá. Crônicas do estado de exceção is a collection representative of the work I have developed recently bringing literary-informed scholarship to cultural and political supplements of Brazilian print and online media. The book includes expanded versions of position pieces written for the Brazilian press in four major areas (US, Palestine, Spanish American and Brazilian politics) and addresses recent Latin American politics primarily in matters related to the environment and to indigenous issues. In addition, my recent scholarly articles have included a series of pieces on masculinity in literature and culture. This work, supported by a fellowship of the American Council for Learned Societies, has yielded a number of scholarly articles on Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges and Gustavo Ferreyra, and Brazilians Gilberto Freyre, Fernando Gabeira, and Cristóvão Tezza.

My forthcoming book is entitled De antagonismos e oxímoros: Retórica e luta política no Brasil do século XXI and is under contract with Brazil’s foremost press, Record. My hope is to finish it in time to bring it to print in 2020. It is an analysis of the rhetorical components of Brazil’s unique and complicated political processes since Lula took power in 2003. Particularly, the book addresses the past five years, marked by the greatest popular assemblies and protests in the history of the country, arguably the largest corruption investigation ever in Western democracies, and the election of the most extreme right-wing coalition to have emerged in the recent populist wave. Some of this work has been published in Luso-Brazilian Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, O Estado de São Paulo, Lugar Comum and other journals around the world.

My research specialty is late twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian literature, cinema, and television with a focus on human rights and feminisms. My book Memory’s Turn (Critical Human Rights series, University of Wisconsin, 2014) sought to theorize the synergies between certain cultural works (including films, memoirs, TV miniseries and telenovelas, novels, and theatrical plays) and the institutional measures implemented by the State to reckon with the military-civilian dictatorship that governed the country for twenty-one years. It received a best book award from SECOLAS and honorable mention by the Brazilian Studies Association. While writing the book I also created and oversaw the blog Transitional Justice in Brazil maintained by Tulane undergraduate and graduate research assistants between 2012 and 2014.

While I continue to write about memory politics in Brazil, my research has increasingly focused questions of gender and sexuality. I am currently working on a project that traces the trajectory of Brazilian feminisms (in the plural) from the final years of the dictatorship up to presidency of Jair Bolsonaro. Some of my recent and current shorter projects meld these two areas of interest, such as my article in Current History exploring the relationship of human rights memory to Brazil’s 2018 elections and the mobilization of women in the #EleNão movement, as well as an essay, forthcoming in an edited volume on military memory in Latin America, that undertakes a feminist analysis of how military memoirs about the Brazilian military-civilian dictatorship have intervened in memory debates from mid 1980s to the current Bolsonaro administration. I’m currently working on a feminist rereading of the initial boom of autobiographical writings by Leftwing militants and revolutionaries, and article (with Fernanda Sanglard) analyzing the recent right turn in Brazilian memory politics, as well as an essay on documentary films about sexual violence in the wake of Brazil’s Primavera Feminista.

As of 2019, I am the Brazilian literature editor for the Luso-Brazilian Review, and have also served as an elected member on the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (2012-2016). Since 2017, I have directed Tulane’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program (including its graduate certificate program). I teach courses on Brazilian literature and culture in the Department of Spanish and Culture and the feminist theory seminar for graduate students and majors in the Gender and Sexuality Studies program, and led Tulane’s summer program in São Paulo in 2014 and 2015. Recent upper level and graduate course topics include human rights in Brazil as well Brazilian cities.

Moisés Arce is the Scott and Marjorie Cowen Chair in Latin American Social Sciences and Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University. He received his PhD in political science from the University of New Mexico in 2000. Professor Arce specializes in environmental politics, conflict processes, democratic governance, and comparative political economy. He is the author of Popular Politics and Protest Event Analysis in Latin America (University of New Mexico Press, 2024, with Takeshi Wada), Perú: Cuatro décadas de contienda popular (FLACSO Ecuador, 2023), The Roots of Engagement (Oxford University Press, 2022, with Michael Hendricks and Marc Polizzi), Protest and Democracy (University of Calgary Press, 2019, with Roberta Rice), Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), Market Reform in Society (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), and numerous journal articles and book chapters. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Professor Arce has served as a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (2003) and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo (2014).