Through its Visiting Scholar Program, CLAS provides a temporary home to Latin Americanists from domestic and international institutions. CLAS offers three types of affiliations: Research Associate for visiting faculty, Post-doctoral Fellow for scholars who have received their Ph.D.s within the last two years, and Pre-doctoral Fellow for scholars who are conducting research for their dissertations.  Below is a brief background on a few of this year's visiting scholars.

Ruth Cardoso, First Lady of Brazil, is the head of the Comunidade Solidária program, Brazil's most important umbrella organization for community service. A distinguished anthropologist specializing in urban culture and youth, she has also researched extensively on political participation and the informal sector. Dr. Cardoso taught at the universities of Cambridge, Santiago, and São Paulo, where she was chair of the graduate program in political science. During the spring 2000 semester, she is teaching a graduate seminar at CLAS entitled "Youth in Brazil: Social Conditions, Culture and Public Policies."

Mark Danner, a staff member at The New Yorker Magazine, taught two classes at the Graduate School of Journalism in the Spring of 1999: "Wars, Coups, and Revolutions" and "Economic Chaos and its Bloody Reprecussions". He has just completed a book about America and the Balkans called The Saddest Story: America the Balkans and the Post-Cold War World which has been appearing in The New York Review of Books . He is currently working on a book about Haiti, forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf titled Beyond the Mountains: The Legacy of Duvalier. In 1990, Danner won the Magazine Award for Reporting for his coverage of the island nation. In 1993, he won an Overseas Press Club award for his investigative reporting of the notorious massacre in the remote Salvadoran town, El Mozote, and wrote his first book based on his series on the massacre. The book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War was published by Vintage in 1994. Danner is also working in conjunction with the Human Rights Center at U.C. Berkeley.