John Henry Coatsworth

Last updated
John Henry Coatsworth
Born (1940-09-27) September 27, 1940 (age 82)
New York City, New York, United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields Latin American history
Institutions

John Henry Coatsworth (born September 27, 1940) is an American historian of Latin America and the former [1] provost of Columbia University. [2] From 2012 until June 30, 2019, Coatsworth served as Columbia provost. [1] From 2007 until February 2012 Coatsworth was the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and served concurrently as interim provost beginning in 2011. Coatsworth is a scholar of Latin American economic, social and international history, with an emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Contents

Biography

Coatsworth received his B.A. degree in history from Wesleyan University (1963) and his M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees in economic history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1969 until 1992 and at Harvard University until 2006. His other academic posts have included visiting professorships at El Colegio de México, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the National University of Buenos Aires, the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, and the Instituto Ortega y Gassett in Madrid.

Coatsworth is the author or editor of eight books and many scholarly articles on Latin American economic and international history. He is a former president of the American Historical Association and Latin American Studies Association. At Harvard University, he served as the founding director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies from its creation in 1994 until 2006. He also chaired the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies. He is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, the board of directors of the Tinker Foundation, the board of trustees and the scientific council of the Foundation Institute IMDEA Social Sciences, and numerous professional associations.

He has served on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals, including the American Historical Review , the Journal of Economic History , and the Hispanic American Historical Review and as well as social science and history journals published in Britain, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Peru, and Spain. Coatsworth's most recent book is Living Standards in Latin American History: Height, Welfare and Development, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2010), edited with Ricardo Salvatore and Amilcar Challú. His research and publications have focused on comparative economic, social, and international history of Latin America, especially Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Coatsworth was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1986, served as Senior Fulbright Lecturer three times (for appointments in Argentina and Mexico), and has received research and institutional grants from public agencies and private foundations in the United States and elsewhere. He has also acted as a consultant for program design or review to numerous U.S. universities and private foundations. In 2005, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Controversy

While addressing the President of Iran's upcoming visit to the Columbia University campus on Fox News, Coatsworth was asked whether the administration would have allowed Adolf Hitler to speak on campus if he had asked. Coatsworth replied that "If he [Hitler] were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him." [3]

Asked to clarify his remarks on September 24 on CNN Coatsworth said: "Look, if Hitler had come to the Columbia University in 1936, I would have been outside with the peaceful protesters. Or if I had been dean, I would have been inside presenting him to our students to be challenged. You can't choose your role in life. You can only choose the principles you have to live by. And in this case, we're providing not a platform but a classroom and we're going to challenge this guy as he has not been challenged in other places."

Coatsworth has advocated for the U.S. to abide by and strengthen global rules and norms. "The United States faces a fundamental issue and that issue is, how do we create international and global institutions that function effectively and will continue to function effectively when the U.S. is no longer a global super power", Coatsworth said in an April 9, 2010, interview with Charlie Rose on PBS.

Publications

Books

Articles and book chapters

Short articles and commentary

Book reviews

Published in Americas, Business History Review, Economía y Demografía, Economic History Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Economic History, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, Library Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology.

Related Research Articles

<i>Científico</i> Circle of technocratic advisors to President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz

The Científicos were a circle of technocratic advisors to President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz. Steeped in the positivist "scientific politics", they functioned as part of his program of modernization at the start of the 20th century.

Classical Nahuatl is any of the variants of Nahuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a lingua franca at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. During the subsequent centuries, it was largely displaced by Spanish and evolved into some of the modern Nahuan languages in use today. Although classified as an extinct language, Classical Nahuatl has survived through a multitude of written sources transcribed by Nahua peoples and Spaniards in the Latin script.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Héctor Aguilar Camín</span> Mexican writer, journalist and historian

Héctor Aguilar Camín is a Mexican writer, journalist, and historian, director of Nexos magazine. Nexos was fined and banned for two years (2020-2022) from contracts with the Mexican Government for illicit financing. This decision was later reversed by the Tribunal Federal de Justicia Administrativa (TFJA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Meyer</span>

Jean Meyer Barth is a French-Mexican historian and author, known for his writings on early 20th-century Mexican history. He has published extensively on the Mexican Revolution and Cristero War, the history of Nayarit, and on the caudillo Manuel Lozada. He is a faculty member at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

Antonio Alatorre Vergara was a Mexican writer, philologist and translator, famous due to his influential academic essays about Spanish literature, and because of his book Los 1001 años de la lengua española.

Fondo de Cultura Económica is a Spanish language, non-profit publishing group, partly funded by the Mexican government. It is based in Mexico but it has subsidiaries throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

James Lockhart was a U.S. historian of colonial Spanish America, especially the Nahua people and Nahuatl language.

Mitchell A. Seligson is the Centennial Professor of Political Science and Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. He founded and is Senior Advisor to the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which conducts the AmericasBarometer surveys that currently cover 27 countries in the Americas. Seligson has published many books and papers on political science topics. He was elected to membership in the General Assembly of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in 2011.

Claudio Lomnitz is the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Lomnitz was a Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Committee on Historical Studies at the New School University. He served at different points in time as co-director of the University of Chicago's Mexican Studies Program, Director of the University of Chicago's Latin American Studies Program, and Director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. He has also taught at University of Chicago, where he was Professor of History, New York University, El Colegio de México, and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, in Mexico City. At the New School University, Lomnitz was appointed editor of the academic journal Public Culture, which moved with him to Columbia University in 2006. He continued to serve as editor until 2011. In 2020 he was elected member of Mexico's Colegio Nacional.

Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo is a Mexican sociologist and public intellectual of wide renown in Mexico and Spain. He is perhaps most well known for his study of nineteenth-century civic culture in Mexico, Imaginary Citizens, a book that made his reputation as a highly skilled interpreter of Mexican politics and has since gone through three editions. He is the author of over a dozen additional books and a large number of scholarly articles on political theory, historical sociology, and cultural criticism. Escalante also intervenes frequently in the print and television media of Mexico, and has been widely cited in sociological papers and studies on his views of cultural transformation of Mexico.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jorge Alberto Lozoya</span> Mexican diplomat

Jorge Alberto Lozoya Legorreta is a Mexican diplomat with broad experience in international cooperation and cultural affairs. He has also been associated with some of the top Mexican and international academic institutions, with special interest on Asian civilizations and prospective studies and international negotiations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Lafaye</span> French historian

Professor Jacques Lafaye, is a French historian who, from the early 1960s has written influentially on cultural and religious Spanish and Latin American history. His most popular work is Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe written in 1974 regarding the formation of the Mexican National Consciousness and includes a prologue by Octavio Paz and is regarded as a keystone for the understanding of the contemporary Mexican culture and is regarded as one of the most comprehensive analyses of the colonial period in Mexico.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Bartra</span> Mexican sociologist and anthropologist

Roger Bartra Murià is a Mexican sociologist and anthropologist, son of the exiled Catalan writers Agustí Bartra and Anna Murià, who settled in Mexico after the defeat of the democratic forces in the Spanish Civil War. Roger Bartra is recognized as one of the most important contemporary social scientists in Latin America.

Carlos Marichal is a Mexican economic historian who currently works at El Colegio de México, where he has taught since 1989. He has done research and published widely on the economic and financial history of Latin America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rolando Antonio Pérez Fernández</span> Cuban musician

Rolando Antonio Pérez Fernández is a Cuban musicologist, cellist and professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Brading</span> British historian

David Anthony Brading FRHistS, FBA, is a British historian and Professor Emeritus of Mexican History at the University of Cambridge, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Bolton Prize in 1972, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, and the Medalla 1808—both of which were awarded by the Mexican government—and the Medal of Congress from the Peruvian government in 2011.

François Chevalier was a distinguished French historian of Latin America. His most well-known publication is La formation des grands domaines au Mexique. Translated to Spanish (1956) and English (1963), it is a classic and pioneering work on agrarian history in colonial Mexico, a point of departure for later studies of Mexican haciendas sparking a discussion on whether they were fundamentally feudal or capitalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Hodara</span>

Joseph Hodara is an Israeli sociologist and journalist. Hodara teaches at Bar-Ilan University.

Silvia Marina Arrom is an American historian of Mexico. She is the Jane's Professor Emerita of Latin American Studies at Brandeis University.

Marysa Navarro Aranguren is a Spanish-American historian specializing in the history of feminism, the history of Latin American women, and the history of Latin America. She occupies a prominent role as a promoter and activist in the areas of women's studies and women's history. Navarro is an expert on the figure of Eva Perón, having published her biography, and having written articles about her. Navarro lives in the United States, and has dual citizenship, Spanish and U.S.

References

  1. 1 2 "John Coatsworth to Step Down as Provost". Columbia University. March 14, 2019.
  2. Harman, Inge Maria; Hispanic Division (1985). National directory of Latin Americanists: Biographies of 4,915 specialists. ISBN   9780844404912.
  3. Video on YouTube