César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante". The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo "the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language." He was a member of the intellectual community called North Group formed in the Peruvian north coastal city of Trujillo.
Eduardo Mata was a Mexican conductor and composer.
José Toribio Medina Zavala was a Chilean bibliographer, prolific writer, and historian. He is renowned for his study of colonial literature in Chile, printing in Spanish America and large bibliographies such as the Biblioteca Hispano-Americana.
Charles Culliford Boz Dickens, better known as Charles Dickens Jr., was the first child of the English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine. A failed businessman, he became the editor of his father's magazine All the Year Round, and a writer of dictionaries. He is now most remembered for his two 1879 books, Dickens's Dictionary of London and Dickens's Dictionary of the Thames.
Latin American studies (LAS) is an academic and research field associated with the study of Latin America. The interdisciplinary study is a subfield of area studies, and can be composed of numerous disciplines such as economics, sociology, history, international relations, political science, geography, gender studies, and literature.
Clarence Henry Haring was an important historian of Latin America and a pioneer in initiating the study of Latin American colonial institutions among scholars in the United States.
Charles Gibson was an American ethnohistorian who wrote foundational works on the Nahua peoples of colonial Mexico and was elected President of the American Historical Association in 1977.
Georgette de Montenay (1540–1581) was the French author of Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes, published in Lyon between 1567 and 1571. Montenay has always been regarded as a lady-in-waiting to Jeanne d'Albret, the Protestant Queen of Navarre, partly because she dedicated her work to the Queen. An intriguing aspect of Montenay's Calvinist life is that she was married in 1562 to Guyon de Gout, a devout Catholic.
Lewis Hanke (1905–1993) was an American historian of colonial Latin America, and is best known for his writings on the Spanish conquest of Latin America. Hanke, along with two others, Irving A. Leonard and John T. Lanning, presented a revisionist narrative of colonial history that focused on the role of Bartolomé de las Casas, who famously advocated for the rights of Native Americans, and searched for just resolutions to the tensions between the conquistadores and the natives during the colonial period of Spanish rule. Hanke's writings documented Las Casas' work as a political activist, historian, political theorist, and anthropologist. His scholarship also uncovered evidence to support Hanke's claim that Las Casas did not act as the sole voice of conscience during the colonial era, but actually constituted the head of what was a larger reform movement by a number of Spanish colonists to prevent "the destruction of the Indies.”
The Handbook of South American Indians is a monographic series of edited scholarly and reference volumes in ethnographic studies, published by the Smithsonian Institution between 1940 and 1947.
Ann Hartness is an academic research librarian who was Head Librarian of the University of Texas (UT) Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection from 2002 to 2008. The library, established in 1926, is the largest dedicated to Latin America in the United States, and is part of the Perry–Castañeda Library, the country's fifth-largest academic library.
Lambros Comitas was Gardner Cowles Professor of Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. A product of Columbia University, he received the A.B. from Columbia College in 1948 after service in the United States Army, and was awarded the Ph.D. in anthropology in 1962 from the Columbia Faculty of Political Science. Influential figures in his early professional years were Conrad Arensberg, Marvin Harris, Charles Wagley and Margaret Mead from the Columbia faculty and M. G. Smith, the eminent British-trained anthropologist whom he first met during field work in Jamaica.
John R. Hébert is an American librarian and author. He was employed at the Library of Congress for over 43 years when he retired in 2012.
The Hispanic American Historical Review is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal of Latin American history, the official publication of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians. Founded in 1916, HAHR is the oldest journal of Latin American history, and, since 1926, published by Duke University Press. On July 1, 2017 editorial responsibility shifted from Duke University to Penn State for the 2017-2022 term.
Howard F. Cline was an American government official and historian, specialising in Latin America. Cline served as Director of the Hispanic Foundation at the Library of Congress from 1952 until his death in June 1971. He was one of the founders of the Latin American Studies Association. He was also active in the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), the professional organization of Latin American historians, which he chaired in 1964. He is still highly regarded as a scholar "devoted to and effective in the promotion of Latin American studies in the United States."
Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture is a comprehensive reference work, with over 5,000 articles by specialists in Latin American history, politics, and culture. The first edition of the encyclopedia comprises five print volumes, edited by Barbara Tenenbaum of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. A second edition in 2008 comprises six volumes, edited by Jay Kinsbruner and Erick Langer, in print and electronic format. There are lengthy, comprehensive articles, as well as shorter topical ones. Three thousand biographical sketches of important Latin Americans range from the prehispanic era to the late twentieth-century from all parts of Latin America. There are a large number of illustrations and maps. In addition, there is large index to the set, and cross-referencing within articles. Reviewer Thomas E. Skidmore says, "The publication of this Encyclopedia is a landmark in the development of Latin American Studies in the English-speaking world. It gives convincing evidence of maturity of the field." Another reviewer praised it for "its focus on Latin America, is an ideal compromise between national and universal encyclopedias." It was reviewed in a number of other journals. Its editor won the Waldo G. Leland Prize "awarded every five years for the most outstanding reference work in history. The project was praised for providing information on individuals, culture, and institutions, which went well beyond the famous ones."
Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M. was a Franciscan friar, a scholar of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and director of the Academy of American Franciscan History. He edited four volumes of the writings Junípero Serra, founder of the Franciscan missions in late eighteenth-century Alta California, canonized in 2015. Tibesar served as editor of the peer reviewed scholarly journal, The Americas.
The Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM) is the oldest professional Area Studies library organization for academic librarians, archivists, book vendors, scholars, and students who specialize in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Members are from at least 20 different countries. SALALM promotes better library services and purchasing power among individual members and member libraries. With the Secretariat based at Tulane University's Latin American Library, it is an international non-profit professional organization with three official languages: English, Spanish, and Portuguese. SALALM is an affiliate of the American Library Association. As of May 2015, the organization had 242 personal and 84 institutional members including librarians, archivists, book dealers, vendors, and university libraries.
José Juan Arrom was a leading authority on Latin American cultural studies and a pioneer in shaping the field in the United States at a time when most Spanish departments mainly taught about peninsular Spain. He is particularly well-known for his studies of Latin American theater, Cuban culture and lexicology, and the myths of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean. He was a professor of Latin American Literature at Yale University for nearly 40 years.
