Center for Latin American Studies, UC Berkeley

Visiting Scholars Fall 2008

Each year CLAS sponsors an outstanding group of visiting scholars. The group ranges from area specialists to public intellectuals and practitioners. Visiting scholars give public talks and participate fully in the intellectual life at CLAS.

Visiting Professors

Barry Carr, Australia

Barry Carr taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne from 1972 until 2008 and served as director of the university’s Institute of Latin American Studies for most of that period. The first president of the newly formed network of Latin Americanists of Asia and Oceania, CELAO, his research has focused mostly on modern Mexico and Cuba. He is currently completing a history of Mexico since the 1940s and a study of the Cuban sugar industry, 1910-1935, as well as co-editing a collection of essays on the emergence of a new constellation of left-wing and center-left politics in Latin America. His earlier books include: Marxism and Communism in Twentieth Century Mexico; The Cuba Reader: History, Politics and Culture; El movimiento obrero y la politica en Mexico 1910-1928. During his stay in Berkeley, he will be teaching courses on Cuban history and testimonial literature.

Jean-Paul Faguet, England

Jean-Paul Faguet is a tenured Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Political Economy of Development, and program director for Development Management at the London School of Economics. His work lies at the frontier between economics and politics, blending quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence in an attempt to discover why some groups of people govern themselves well and others don’t. Specific fields of interest include political economy, public economics, comparative politics and development economics. Since 2001 he has been involved with Joseph Stiglitz’ Initiative for Policy Dialogue. Before coming to the LSE, he worked for the World Bank in La Paz, supervising Bolivia’s Social Investment Fund as well as projects in health, education, early childhood development and the environment. While at CLAS he will be working on a series of papers on local institutions and spatial patterns of violence in Colombia, and completing a book titled Governance from Below: Making Decentralization Work in Bolivia.

Kent Eaton

Kent Eaton is an associate professor in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz. The author of Politicians and Economic Reform in New Democracies: Argentina and the Philippines in the 1990s and Politics Beyond the Capital: The Design of Subnational Institutions in South America, his articles have appeared in several comparative politics journals. Previously, he taught at Princeton University and at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Currently, Professor Eaton’s research examines the growing salience of territorial conflict in Latin America from three different perspectives. First, in the wake of economic liberalization and decentralization, he is studying the conflicts that have developed between subnational governments and transnational corporations over the terms and benefits of direct foreign investment. Second, he is examining the sources of increased tension between subnational governments, focusing in particular on the rise of conservative autonomy movements. Third, he is studying the consequences of decentralization in conflict-prone settings, investigating the conditions under which decentralizing reforms either ameliorate or worsen armed conflict.

Senior Scholars

Maria Echaveste

Maria Echaveste is a Lecturer in Residence at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and the co-founder of the Nueva Vista Group, a consulting firm that works with nonprofit organizations, associations and corporations on such issues as immigration, health care, telecommunications, labor and finances. From 1998 to 2001, Echaveste served as assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. She also specialized in international issues related to Latin America. From 1997 to 1998, Echaveste was director of the Office of Public Liaison at the White House and the administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division from 1993 to 1997.

Kirsten Sehnbruch

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a Senior Scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies, UC Berkeley, where she teaches a course on Latin American development and labor markets. She works as a consultant to the Chilean government on a range of issues related to labor market policy and other social policies. Her book “The Chilean Labor Market: A Key to Understanding Latin American Labor Markets” was published by Palgrave Macmillan in September 2006. Sehnbruch’s research interests focus on labor policies in Latin America, labor and social policies in Chile, and on applications of Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach. She originally received her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Currently, she is working on a book reviewing the quality of employment in a number of Latin American countries. She is also the President of the Labor Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association.

See Dr. Sehnbruch's website for her publications.

Research Associates

Luciana Andressa Martins de Souza, Brazil

Luciana Andressa Martins de Souza is a Ph.D. student at the Federal University of São Carlos in São Paulo and a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. From 2003 to 2006 she worked as a consultant to Brazilian municipal governments on a range of issues including public health policy, civil society and popular participation in local decision-making, i.e., participatory budgeting. Her dissertation examines the impact of the implementation of participatory budgeting on political and institutional changes related to the decision-making process and to local political representation in six Brazilian cities. Her research focuses on the consolidation of practices and political institutions that have the capacity to increase popular participation and government accountability.