Michael Lee Conniff (born 1942) is a historian of Latin America, who specializes on modern Brazil and Panama. Between 2002 and 2012 he also created and directed the Global Studies program and afterward served as professor of history at San Jose State University, California. He went to half-time teaching in 2012 and retired in 2016. He has longstanding interests in populism and Africans in Latin America.
In 1962 Conniff joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Guayaquil, Ecuador, as a volunteer for urban community development. He continued working in community development as a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Panama (1966-1967).
Conniff earned his BA in Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, followed by an MA in the same field at Stanford in 1969.
Conniff spent 1971–75 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he conducted research for his doctorate in Brazilian history at Stanford. He also worked as a consultant for social science and urban programs at the Ford Foundation office there and taught classes at the Pontifical Catholic University.
In 1975 Conniff moved with his family to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he began as lecturer in history (1975-1976) at the University of New Mexico and finished his doctorate in Latin American History at Stanford. Between 1976 and 1985 he rose through the ranks to full professor. Meanwhile, his dissertation was published as Urban Politics in Brazil: The Rise of Populism, 1925-1945 (1981). He also edited and contributed to Latin American Populism in Comparative Perspective (1982). Three years later he published Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (1985). He then co-edited and co-authored, with Frank D. McCann, Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Comparative Perspective (1989, revised 1991).
In 1990 Conniff moved to Auburn University, where he spent the next seven years as professor and part-time administrator. During that time he published Panama and the United States: the Forced Alliance (1992, revised 2001 and 2012) and Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora (with Thomas J. Davis, 1994, reprinted 2003).
In 1997 Conniff became founding director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and professor of history at the University of South Florida, and also founder and co-director for the Center for Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance in Tampa (1998-2000). During this time he and Lawrence Clayton published A New History of Modern Latin America (1999, revised 2005 and 2017, with Susan Gauss), and edited and contributed to Populism in Latin America (1999, revised 2012). His Modern Panama, co-authored with Gene E. Bigler, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
During his career Conniff won and administered nearly four million dollars in grants from agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education, the Office of Naval Research, and the Defense Language Institute. He has four sons and eight grandchildren.
Since retiring Conniff has written several novels of historical fiction set in Latin America.
Indigenismo is a political ideology in several Latin American countries which emphasizes the relationship between the nation state and indigenous nations and indigenous peoples. In some contemporary uses, it refers to the pursuit of greater social and political inclusion for indigenous peoples in Latin America, whether through nation-wide reforms or region-wide alliances. In either case, this type of indigenismo seeks to vindicate indigenous cultural and linguistic difference, assert indigenous rights, and seek recognition and in some cases compensation for past wrongdoings of the colonial and republican states. Nevertheless, some historical figures like José Martí are classified as having been both indigenistas and hispanistas.
Guillermo Alberto O'Donnell Ure was a prominent Argentine political scientist who specialized in comparative politics and Latin American politics. He spent most of his career working in Argentina and the United States, and who made lasting contributions to theorizing on authoritarianism and democratization, democracy and the state, and the politics of Latin America. His brother is Pacho O'Donnell.
Alan Knight is a professor and researcher of Latin American history and former professor at the University of Oxford in England. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government.
James Lockhart was a U.S. historian of colonial Spanish America, especially the Nahua people and Nahuatl language.
Edgar Ghislain Charles Polomé was a Belgian-American philologist and religious studies scholar. He specialized in Germanic and Indo-European studies and was active at the University of Texas at Austin for much of his career.
Alfred C. Stepan was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics and Latin American politics. He was the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion. He is known for his comparative politics research on the military, state institutions, democratization, and democracy.
Beatriz Jaguaribe is a professor of comparative communications in the School of Communications at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Carlos Alberto Torres Novoa is a distinguished professor.
K. Ludwig Pfeiffer is a German scholar in literary, media and cultural studies. Besides his own publications, he is the editor and co-editor of 14 volumes in various research disciplines. He has also published about 150 scholarly articles on important topics in the humanities.
Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to world history.
Robert W. Thurston is an American historian and author. He is professor emeritus at Miami University. His most recent publication is "Lynching" in the Elgar Encyclopedia of Crime and Criminal Justice His latest book is The Body in the Anglosphere, 1880-1920. This study examines concepts of gender, sexuality, race, and civilization as they were affected by new ideas, close interaction between races, and new technology like photography. He has also written on coffee. Perhaps primarily known for his work on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Thurston has also written on early modern witch hunts. He is also co-founder and managing partner of the Oxford Coffee Company, a roastery and coffeehouse in Oxford, Ohio.
Caleb Powell Haun Saussy is an American professor at the University of Chicago. Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, by his parents Haun and Tupper Saussy, he pursued his undergraduate studies at Duke University. He is currently married to Olga V. Solovieva and has five children.
Djelal Kadir is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where he teaches literatures of the Americas, modernism, postmodernism, world literature, and classical and modern theory, and where he has been the recipient of departmental teaching awards and the College Distinguished Service Medal. He has published more than one hundred articles and is the author and editor of a dozen books on the Americas, globalization, world literature, postcolonialism, modernism and literary theory as well as editor of more than twenty special issues of literary periodicals. Kadir’s own poetry and scholarly works have been translated into Greek, Polish, Turkish, French, Arabic, and Spanish.
Barbara Weinstein is a professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at New York University. Her research interests include race, gender, labor, and political economy, especially in relation to the making of modern Brazil.
Christopher B. Krebs is the Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies, Professor of Classics, and, by courtesy, of German Studies and Comparative Literature Stanford University. Krebs' principal research interests are Greek and Roman Historiography, Latin Lexicography and the Classical tradition.
Raanan Rein is the Elías Sourasky Professor of Latin American and Spanish History and former Vice President of Tel Aviv University. Since 2005 Rein is the Head of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies. He is a member of Argentina's National Academy of History, and former President of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). The Argentine government awarded him the title of Commander in the Order of the Liberator San Martín for his contribution to Argentine culture. The Spanish government awarded him the title of Commander in the Order of Civil Merit. His current research deals with Jewish Argentines and Peronism, sports and politics in Argentina, Jewish Self-Defense organizations, and Jewish volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.
Ronald H. Chilcote is a political economist from the United States. He is currently the Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, and has served as managing editor of the academic journal Latin American Perspectives since its founding in 1974. Chilcote's main area of research is on Brazil, Portugal and the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, as well as comparative politics, political economy and development theory.
Conference on Latin American History, (CLAH), founded in 1926, is the professional organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association. It publishes the journal The Hispanic American Historical Review.
Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasise the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite". This article focuses on populism in Latin America.
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.
