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 retired in 2012. He has a longstanding interest in the study of 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 an advisor to 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 II in history (1975-1976) at the University of New Mexico and earned his Doctor of Philosophy 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 worked with Lawrence Clayton to publish 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, is forthcoming from 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.
Richard Graham is a Brazilian/American historian specializing in nineteenth-century Brazil. He was formerly Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin, and is now professor emeritus there. He served as president of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians.
Stephen David Krasner is an American academic and former diplomat. Krasner has been a professor of international relations at Stanford University since 1981, and served as the Director of Policy Planning from 2005 to April 2007 while on leave from Stanford.
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.
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.
Edgar Ghislain Charles Polomé was a Belgian-born 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.
Carlos Alberto Torres Novoa is a distinguished professor.
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.
Edwin Gentzler is a Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and former Director of the Translation Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Robert W. Thurston is an American historian and author. He is professor emeritus at Miami University (Ohio) and founder and managing partner of Oxford Coffee Company, a roastery and coffeehouse. His most recent publications have been 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 University Professor at the University of Chicago.
Francis Daniel McCann, better known as Frank McCann was a historian, an American Brazilianist expert in Brazilian military history. He was a professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire.
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.
Gareth Jones is a professor of urban geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE), and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.
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.
Marc Edelman is a professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was president of the American Ethnological Society from 2017 to 2019.
