Biographies of Participants
- Virgilio Álvarez Aragón
- Arturo Arias
- Patrick Ball
- Daniel Brinks
- Luis Carcamo-Huechante
- Kate Doyle
- Ariel Dulitzky
- Karen Engle
- Anna Carla Ericastilla
- Virginia Garrard-Burnett
- Charles Hale
- Fred Heath
- Christian Kelleher
- Steven Leslie
- Gustavo Meoño
- Susan M. Reverby
- Lawrence Sager
- Steve Stern
- Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj
Virgilio Álvarez Aragón is the director of the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Guatemala. He is a researcher, consultant, and analyst of themes referring to educational sociology and politics, with an emphasis on the sociology of the teaching profession and politics of higher education. In addition, he has participated in various collegiate bodies dedicated to postgraduate administration. He has worked as a teacher and researcher at the Universities of San Carlos and Del Valle in Guatemala, UAM Atzcapotzalco and Xochimilco in Mexico, la Universidad de Brasilia, and FLACSO Mexico and Guatemala. He has a Ph.D. in Sociology and Comparative Studies of Latin America and the Caribbean, received his Master's degree in Sociology from FLACSO-México and his Bachelor's degree in Pedagogy and the Science of Education from the Universidad de San Carlos, Guatemala.
Arturo Arias is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, and also teaches as a professor for Latin American Literature. Dr. Arias is a well-known expert on Central American literature, with a special emphasis on indigenous literature, as well as critical theory, race, gender and sexuality in postcolonial studies. He has published Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007), The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy (2000), The Identity of the Word (1998), and Ceremonial Gestures (1998), as well as a critical edition of Miguel Angel Asturias's Mulata (2000). Professor Arias served as the 2001-2003 President of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). He co-wrote the film El Norte (1984), and has published six novels in Spanish. Twice winner of the Casa de las Americas Award for his fiction, and winner of the Ana Seghers Award for fiction in Germany, he received the Miguel Angel Asturias National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature in 2008 in his native Guatemala. Arturo Arias received his Ph.D. in Sociology of Literature from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and an M.A. and B.A. in English from Boston University.
Patrick Ball is the Chief Scientist and Vice President of the Human Rights Program at Benetech. He is a leading innovator in applying scientific measurement to human rights. He has spent twenty years designing databases and conducting quantitative analysis for truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, international criminal tribunals and United Nations missions in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Chad, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Kosovo, Liberia, and Perú. He began this work at a human rights NGO in El Salvador in 1991. From 1993-2003, he worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the Science and Human Rights Program where he began recruiting colleagues to build the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Patrick is currently involved in Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) projects in Guatemala, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and others. Ball received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and his B.A. from Columbia University.
Daniel Brinks is associate professor of government and co-director of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the role of the law and courts in supporting or extending human rights and many of the basic rights associated with democracy, with a primary regional interest in Latin America. He is currently at work on a project that examines constitutional change in Latin America since about 1975, focusing especially on judicial institutions and constitutional review. He has published articles in journals such as Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy en Español, and the Texas International Law Journal. His books Courting Social Justice: The Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World (co-edited with Varun Gauri), and The Judicial Response to Police Violence in Latin America: Inequality and the Rule of Law were both published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Brinks received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame and J.D. from the University of Michigan.
Luis Carcamo-Huechante is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, with a specific focus on Latin American and indigenous literatures and cultures. He is of Mapuche origin and grew up in Tralcao, a rural village in the River Region of Valdivia in southern Chile. In 2007, he published his first book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio). He has also co-edited a volume of essays entitled El valor de la cultura: arte, literatura y mercado en América Latina (with Alvaro Fernández-Bravo and Alejandra Laera, Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007). With José Antonio Mazzotti, he has been the co-editor of a special issue of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana on "Poesía, crítica y globalización cultural en las Américas" (2003). He has published several essays in prestigious academic journals, such as New Centennial Review, Public Culture, Hispanic Review, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista de Crítica Cultural, Casa de las Américas, and Revista Atenea. He taught at Harvard University between 2001 and 2009. He received an M.A. in Spanish from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Cornell University.
Kate Doyle is senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America at The National Security Archive. She currently directs the Guatemala Project, which aims to obtain documents on U.S.-Guatemalan relations, and the Mexico Project, an investigation into democracy and human rights in Mexico that has compiled thousands of declassified U.S. and Mexican government documents on Mexico's history of authoritarianism and democratic transition. She edited two of the Archive's collections of declassified records—Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954-1999 and El Salvador: War, Peace and Human Rights, 1980-1994—and numerous Electronic Briefing Books for the Archive's Web site. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions and prosecutors to obtain government records from secret archives that shed light on state violence. She is a member of the advisory boards of the World Policy Journal, the Journal of the Right to Information, and the Fund for Constitutional Government in Washington. Her articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, Boston Globe, World Policy Journal, Current History, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and other publications. Ms. Doyle received her M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University.
Ariel Dulitzky is clinical professor of law and the director of the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a leading expert in the inter-American human rights system, and in 2010, he was appointed to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Professor Dulitzky has published extensively on human rights, the inter-American human rights system, racial discrimination, and the rule of law in Latin America. He has taught at the University of Buenos Aires and the Washington College of Law at American University. He served as a law clerk for a Federal Circuit Court in Argentina and has been a consultant for the Office of the United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner and the Inter-American Institute on Human Rights. Previously, Professor Dulitzky was the Latin America Program Director at the International Human Rights Law Group (currently Global Rights) and Co-Executive Director of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). Professor Dulitzky has directed the litigation of more than 100 cases in front of the Inter-American Commission and Court on Human Rights. Professor Dulitzky received his J.D. from the University of Buenos Aires and LLM from Harvard University Law School.
Karen Engle is the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and the founder and co-director of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches and researches in the fields of public international law, international human rights law, and Latin American law. Her recent works include The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press, 2010), "On Fragile Architecture: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Context of Human Rights" (European Journal of International Law, 2011), and "The Force of Shame" (in Rethinking Rape Law, with Annelies Lottmann) (Routledge, 2010). She was Professor of Law at the University of Utah prior to joining the University of Texas. Professor Engle received a Bellagio Residency Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2009 and an assignment as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Bogotá in 2010. Professor Engle received her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and her undergraduate degree from Baylor University.
Anna Carla Ericastilla is the director of the General Archive of Central America. She is a historian, archivist, and a professor at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and Facultad Lationamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO). Ms. Ericastilla has written about women and criminality in Guatemala during the Nineteenth Century. She has previously spoken about the US-led experiments in Guatemala during the 1940s. In 2006, Ms. Ericastilla and three others crafted a comprehensive report on the history of intellectuals, the formation of identity and the social movements in Guatemala City from 1920-1944. Most recently, she presented at Grand Valley State University in Michigan on how the Guatemalan national archives responded to the revelations of US-led medical experiences in 1946-1948. She has been an instrumental resource to the writings of many books, including Greg Glandin's "The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War" and Jordana Dym's "From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State and Federation in Central America, 1759-1839."
Virginia Garrard-Burnett is a professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has been on the faculty since 1990. She specializes in the religious history of Latin America with a focus on Protestantism and new religious movements. The recent publication of a Spanish translation of her book Protestantism in Guatemala: Living in the New Jerusalem led one newspaper in that country to describe her as a "worldwide authority on the history of Protestantism in Guatemala." Her most recent book, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983, examines the rule of the born-again Pentecostal dictator Rios Montt, whose military government perpetrated numerous atrocities. She has also edited On Earth as it is in Heaven: Religion and Society in Latin America and co-edited, with David Stoll, Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America. Currently, she and Paul Freston are co-editing the Cambridge History of Religion in Latin America, which is due for publication in 2011. Professor Garrard-Burnett received her Ph.D in History from Tulane University.
Charles Hale is the chair for Western Hemispheric Trade Studies in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies and the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin. An internationally-renowned activist in anthropology, his research focuses on race and ethnicity, identity politics, and consciousness and resistance. He is a recent past president of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and the author of Más que un Indio: Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala and Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987. He is also editor of Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. He taught at the University of California, Davis, before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996. Dr. Hale received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and his B.A. from Harvard.
Fred Heath is Vice Provost and Director of the University of Texas Libraries. He currently serves on the Boards of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and is a member of the Steering Committee of the Digital Library Federation (DLF). He has recently served as President of the Board of Directors of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and chair of the Texas Council of State University Librarians (TCSUL). He is on the Editorial Boards of Library Quarterly and the Journal of Library Administration. He has served as editor of Library Administration and Management (LA&M) and chair of the editorial advisory board to College and Research Library News. He makes frequent presentations and publishes in the areas of digital library trends, evolving user needs, and service quality issues. He received an Ed.D in Education Administration from Virginia Tech, M.S.L.S. from Florida State University, M.A. in Russian History from the University of Virginia, and a B.A. in History from Tulane University.
Christian Kelleher is the archivist at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, where he manages the rare books and manuscripts division, and the project manager of the University of Texas Libraries' Human Rights Documentation Initiative that collects, preserves, and promotes access to documentary evidence and history of human rights conflicts worldwide. Before joining the Benson Collection, he was an archivist and records manager with History Associates Incorporated in Rockville, Maryland, where he worked with a number of organizations in the Washington, DC area, including the Organization of American States, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the National Geographic Channel, and the National Library of Medicine. Mr. Kelleher is a Certified Archivist from the Academy of Certified Archivists. He holds an MLIS from the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Library and Information Science with a specialization in Archival Enterprise.
Steven Leslie is the Provost and chief academic officer for the University of Texas. He has served the University since 1974, beginning as an assistant professor in Pharmacology and Toxicology. He was appointed Dean of the College of Pharmacy in 1998 and Provost in 2007. As provost, he oversees the academic programs on campus, and plays an important role in hiring university research talent. In addition to his groundbreaking research in the field of alcoholism studies, Leslie has held several administrative appointments at the University, including serving as director of the UT Institute for Neuroscience from 1986 to 1992. The interdisciplinary institute is composed of 45 UT faculty in six colleges who focus on studies of the nervous system. Dr. Leslie received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Pharmacology/Toxicology and a B.S. in Pharmacy from Purdue University.
Gustavo Meoño is the coordinator of the Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala, or Archivo Historico de Policia Nacional (AHPN). As the lead investigator of the Archive for the national ombudsman's office, Meoño has been actively involved in both the preservation of the Archive's documents and in collecting evidence from these documents to provide accounts of human rights abuses committed during the country's 36-year civil war. Meoño has served as president of the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation (Fundación Rigoberta Menchú Tum), an organization based in Guatemala City that has played a crucial role in struggles against impunity for human rights violations related to prolonged armed conflict in the country.
Susan M. Reverby is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is an historian of American women, medicine, and nursing. Her most recent book is Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (2009). Her article, "'Normal Exposure' and Inoculation Syphilis: A PHS 'Tuskegee' Doctor in Guatemala, 1946-1948" led to the U.S. apology to Guatemala in 2010. She has spoken widely in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Sweden, on the history of gender, ethics and health care issues. She held the Whitehead and Luella LaMer chairs at Wellesley College and received support for her scholarship from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women. She received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University, an M.A. from New York University, and a B.S. from Cornell University.
Lawrence Sager is John Jeffers Research Chair in Law and Alice Jane Drysdale Sheffield Regents Chair and is Dean of the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. He is one of the nation's preeminent constitutional theorists and scholars. Dean Sager came to Texas from New York University School of Law, where he was the Robert B. McKay Professor and Co-Founder of the Program in Law, Philosophy & Social Theory. He has also taught at Harvard, Princeton, Boston University, UCLA, and the University of Michigan. Dean Sager is the author or co-author of dozens of articles, many now classics in the canon of legal scholarship. Sager is the author of two books: Justice in Plainclothes: a Theory of American Constitutional Practice (Yale Univ. Press), and Religious Freedom and the Constitution (co-authored with Christopher Eisgruber) (Harvard Univ. Press). He received his LL.B. from Colombia University and his B.A. from Pomona College.
Steve Stern is the Alberto Flores Galindo and Hilldale Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In recent years, he has worked on the history of memory struggles and human rights in South America, especially Chile and Peru. His research interests vary widely, but often focus on the various ways people cope with problems of power and social conflict in their societies. His regional interests focus especially on the Andes, Mexico, and Chile/Southern Cone. He won the Bolton-Johnson Prize for his book on Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988 (2006). His most recent book is Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006 (2010). He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Yale University and a B.A. summa cum laude from Cornell University.
Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj is Executive Director of the Support Mechanism for Indigenous Peoples. As an anthropologist and journalist, she has been in the vanguard of the fight for respect for the traditions and culture on the indigenous people of Guatemala. Dr. Velasquez Nimatuj is the first k'iche' woman with a doctorate in Social Sciences in Guatemala. As a journalist she has acquired multiple awards nationally for her written and graphic publications. She has published several books, including Indigenous People, State and the Struggle for Land in Guatemala: Strategies of survival and negotiations in the face of global inequality (The Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences, 2008) and The Small Indigenous Commercial Bourgeoisies of Guatemala: Social, Racial and Gender Inequalities (Social and Jurisdiction Services (SERJUS), 2002). She received a Ph.D. in Anthropology and an M.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.