Research Faculty

Asad L. Asad is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. His scholarly interests encompass social stratification; race, ethnicity, and immigration; surveillance and social control; and health. Asad's current research agenda considers how institutions—particularly U.S. immigration law and policy—reproduce multiple forms of inequality.

Vivian Brates is originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she attended the University of Buenos Aires. She received an M. A. degree from Georgetown University in Latin American Studies, with a focus on Economic Development, and previously an M. A. degree from UC Santa Barbara in Spanish and Latin American Literature. She worked for several years as a Human Rights Observer and Election Monitor with the United Nations and the OAS in Haiti, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Guatemala, as well as an advocate and lobbyist in Washington DC.

She has worked at Stanford since 2005 and has focused on developing...

Dr. Carnoy is a labor economist with a special interest in the political economy of the educational system. He specializes in comparative analysis.

Eliane Cavalleiro holds a PhD in Education, having acquired her Master’s degree in 1988 and her Doctoral degree in 2003 through the School of Education of the University of Sao Paulo – USP.  She served as the executive coordinator of the NGO Geledés – Institute of Black Woman (2000-2004), and also worked as a UNESCO consultant – Regional Education Workshop for Latin America and the Caribbean/OREALC.  She worked as the General Coordinator of Diversity and Educational Inclusion, in the Secretariat of Continuing Education, Literacy and Diversity of the Ministry of Education – MEC (2004- 2006).  Dr. Cavalleiro has an extensive...

Drawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 70’s, and also in Europe in the late 90’s, Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well. He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. Through these seemingly harmless characters Chagoya examines the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression that continues to riddle contemporary American foreign policy.

Chagoya was born and raised in Mexico City. His...

Jennifer (“Jenna”) Davis is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Higgins-Magid Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, both of Stanford University. She also heads the Stanford Program on Water, Health & Development. Professor Davis’ research and teaching is focused at the nexus of water, economic development and public health, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. She has conducted field research in more than 20 countries, including most recently Zambia, Bangladesh, and Uganda.

Alberto Diaz-Cayeros joined the FSI faculty in 2013. He was the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies from 2016 to 2023. From 2008 to 2013 he was Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego, and Director of the Center for US-Mexico Studies. He was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford from 2001-2008, before which he served as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diaz-Cayeros has also served as a researcher at Centro de Investigacion Para el Desarrollo, A.C. in Mexico from 1997-1999. He earned his Ph.D at...

My scientific work examines the study of species interactions in tropical ecosystems from California, Latin America, and other tropical areas of the world. Recent research highlights the decline of animal life (“defaunation”), and how this affects ecosystem processes/services (e.g. disease regulation). I teach ecology, natural history, conservation biology, and biocultural diversity at undergraduate and graduate levels at Stanford, and conduct science education programs with underserved children in the Bay Area and our study sites. My lab includes undergrads, graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scholars from the US, and many other countries. I have co-authored the new Framework for K-12 Science...

William (Bill) Durham is Bing Professor in Human Biology (Emeritus), Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a Senior Fellow (Emeritus) in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. He has been jointly appointed in Human Biology and Anthropology at Stanford since 1977, when he came from the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Bill was an undergraduate Biology major at Stanford, Class of 1971, and received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award at graduation for his contribution to undergraduate education via the NSF-funded Student Air Pollution Research Project, the first student initiative nationally to receive NSF funding...

Professor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering is produced and lived. A central theme is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. Her research is oriented toward understanding how attachments, affect, and practices of intimacy are important registers of politics and economy.

Garcia’s most recent book is The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Set in Mexico City, it examines how violence precedes and functions in the ways families seek to care for and protect...

The natural history of common viral liver diseases of man is poorly understood, despite the fact that chronic liver diseases of man may result in death from liver failure or hepatocellular carcinoma. Our group is interested in understanding:

1) the relationship between clinical and virologic events in patients with chronic viral hepatitis B and C.

2) the impact of antiviral or immunomodulatory therapy on the natural history of patients with hepatitis B or C.

3) The use of new radiologic techniques as diagnostic tools in patients with liver diseases.

Roland Greene's research and teaching are concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world, and with poetry and poetics from the Renaissance to the present.

His most recent book is Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, 2013). Five Words proposes an understanding of early modern culture through the changes embodied in five words or concepts over the sixteenth century: in English, blood, invention, language, resistance, and world, and their counterparts in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Other books include Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas...

Stephen Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In addition, he is a professor of political science, professor of history, and professor of economics (by courtesy).

Haber has spent his career investigating why the world distribution of income so uneven. His papers have been published in economics, history, political science, and law journals.
He is the author of five books and the editor of six more...

Thomas Hansen is the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology. He founded and directed Stanford’s Center for South Asia from 2010 to 2017.

Hansen is an anthropologist of political life, ethno-religious identities, violence and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa. He has multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism.

Much of professor Hansen’s early fieldwork was done during the tumultuous and tense years in the beginning of the 1990s when conflicts between Hindu militants and Muslims defined national agendas and produced frequent violent clashes in the streets. Out...

Héctor Hoyos is a scholar of modern Latin American and comparative literature. He writes about ideological critiques of globalization in the post-1989 Latin American novel, the articulation of critical theory and new materialism in the region’s cultural production, and related topics. His current monograph in progress examines the works of Gabriel García Márquez from a law and humanities perspective.

Saumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.

Saumitra holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining the GSB, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a Center...

Gildred Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies (Emeritus)
Bass All-University Fellow for Excellence in Teaching (Emeritus)
International War Crimes and Human Rights Investigator

Terry Lynn Karl earned her Ph.D. (with distinction) from Stanford University. After serving on the faculty in the Government Department of Harvard University, she joined Stanford University’s Department of Political Science in 1987. She served as director of the Center for Latin American Studies for twelve years when it was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a “center of excellence.” She currently works as a war crimes/human rights investigator/ expert witness for several...

I was born in New York City in the borough of the Bronx on January 6, 1936. I attended public schools in Far Rockaway Queens. After graduating Far Rockaway High School, I first attended Syracuse University from 1953 to 1955 and then transferred to the University of Chicago, where I obtained a BA in history in 1957, an MA in 1959 and a PhD in 1963 with a major in history and a minor in anthropology. I taught Latin American history at the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1969, rising from lecturer to the rank of associate professor with...

Beatriz Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in...

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. I am also a member of the Stanford Civics Initiative and an affiliated faculty of the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies and the Stanford Center for Poverty and Inequality. I have been a Lecturer and a Postdoctoral Associate in Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Los Andes. My research centers on the intersection between social networks and economic history, extending to entrepreneurship and political economy topics...

Ana Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Minian received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. At Stanford University, Minian offers classes on Latinx history, immigration, histories of incarceration and detention, and modern Mexican history.

Minian's first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) received the David Montgomery Award for the best book in labor and working-class history, given jointly by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association; the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Book Award for an early career scholar’s...

Rosamond (Roz) Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor of Global Environmental Policy in the Doerr School of Sustainability; Professor (by courtesy) in Economics; and founding Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) at Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She has been involved in numerous field-level research projects around the world with her students and has published widely on issues related to global food systems, food policy, and aquaculture. She is the co-chair of The Blue Food Assessment, an...

Thomas Andrew O’Keefe is the President of Mercosur Consulting Group, Ltd. [https://www.mercosurconsulting.net], a legal and economic consulting firm that assists companies with their strategic business planning for South America as well as advises Latin American firms exporting to the United States.

Mr. O’Keefe is a dual national of the United States and Chile. He is bilingual in English and Spanish, and fluent in French and Portuguese. He did his undergraduate work at Columbia University, and received his J.D. from the Villanova University School of Law. In 1986, he worked for the legal departments of the Chilean Human Rights Commission and...

Dr. Patricia Rodriguez Espinosa, PhD., MPH, is a native of Habana, Cuba, and clinical psychologist by training. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health and also serves as the Associate Director of Research for the Office of Community Engagement at Stanford Medicine. The ultimate goal of her research is to decrease health inequities among racial/ethnic minority populations, particularly Latinxs and immigrant communities, through transdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship. Her research aims to understand factors that create and maintain health inequities (e.g., racial residential segregation) and use these insights to develop novel multi-level interventions and health...

José David Saldívar is a scholar of late postcontemporary culture, especially the minoritized literatures of the United States, Latin America, and the transamerican hemisphere, and of border narrative and poetics from the sixteenth century to the present.

He is the author of The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Duke University Press, 1991), Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (University of California Press, 1997), and Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Duke University Press, 2012),coeditor (with Monica Hanna and Jennifer Harford Vargas) of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination (Duke University...

Dr. Guillermo Solano-Flores is Professor of Education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the intersection of assessment, cultural and linguistic diversity, and fairness. This research is relevant to the testing of students who are not proficient in English in the U.S., students from different countries in the context of international comparisons, and students with disabilities. His research is based on the use of multidisciplinary approaches that use psychometrics, sociolinguistics, semiotics, and cognitive science in combination. He is the author of the theory of test translation error, which addresses testing across cultures and languages. Also...

Professor Surwillo teaches courses on Iberian literature, with an emphasis on the nineteenth-century. Her research addresses the questions of property, empire, race and personhood as they are manifested by literary works, especially dramatic literature, dealing with colonial slavery, abolition and Spanish citizenship. Surwillo is the author of Monsters by Trade (Stanford 2014), a study of slave traders in Spanish literature and the role of these colonial mediators in the development of modern Spain. She is also the author of The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain (Toronto 2007), an analysis of the development of copyright and authorship in nineteenth-century...

Rebecca Tarlau is Associate Professor of Education at Stanford Graduate School of Education. Dr. Tarlau was formerly Associate Professor of Education and of Labor and Employment Relations at the Pennsylvania State University, where she was the co-founder of the Penn State Consortium for Social Movements and Education Research and Practice. Her ethnographic research agenda has four broad areas of focus: (1) theories of the state and state-society relations; (2) social movements and popular education, labor education, and critical pedagogy; (3) Latin American education and development; and (4) teachers’ unions, teacher activism, and teachers’ work.

Dr. Tarlau is the author of...

Florencia Torche is a social scientist with expertise in social demography and social stratification. Professor Torche’s scholarship examines inequality dynamics including intergenerational mobility, disparities in educational attainment, family dynamics, and assortative mating, among others. Her research also examines the influence of early-life exposures –starting before birth– on iindividual wellbeing and inequality. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, and to the Sociological Research Association in 2013.

Torche has led many large data collection projects, including the first national survey on social mobility in Chile and Mexico. She has...

Harold Trinkunas is the Deputy Director of and a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Dr. Trinkunas served as the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow and director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on issues related to foreign policy, governance, and security, particularly in Latin America. Trinkunas has written on emerging powers and the international order, ungoverned spaces, terrorism financing, borders, and armed non-state actors.

Trinkunas...

Claret Vargas is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Justice and Accountability, a U.S.-based legal non-profit organization that works with impacted communities to seek redress and legal accountability for human rights violations. CJA’s work focuses on building and litigating civil suits in the U.S. for victims of foreign atrocity crimes against perpetrators from numerous countries (e.g., Argentina, Colombia, Chile) and with local human rights groups to support them in their own accountability efforts.  Claret litigates in U.S. federal courts, principally using the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), and collaborates with local partners to...

I am a historian of modern Latin America whose work centers on the intersection of social, political, environmental, and technological change. In particular, I explore questions of water control, agrarian reform, and the effects of climate and weather on the process of social revolution. I employ interdisciplinary historical methods in my scholarship and teaching that seek to transcend the imaginary boundary between the human and nonhuman environments.

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in modern Latin American history, historiography and film, history of US-Latin American relations, comparative history of modern Latin America and East Asia, environmental history of Latin America...