Jessica Burke, assistant professor of Hispanic studies, received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese languages and cultures from Princeton University in 2005. Her research and teaching interests include Latin American literature and culture with a special emphasis on Mexico. She has taught at Princeton and Rutgers University and has lived and studied in Spain, Argentina and Mexico.
Emily Conover joined Hamilton as an assistant professor of economics. She grew up in Colombia and came to the United States for her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College. She then studied economics at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne. Conover earned her Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley. Her fields of specialization are development and labor economics. Conover’s current research interests include health policy, corruption, and formal and informal labor markets, among other topics in applied microeconomics.
More about Emily Conover ...
Virginia Gutierrez-Berner earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in Hispanic literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and her Ph.D. in romance languages and literatures at SUNY Buffalo. Her research focuses on religious and literary texts in connection to politics and nation in Spain and Latin America. Gutierrez-Berner is particularly interested in studying the connections between Christian mysticism and the Inquisition in 16th-century Spain, and between 20th-century Latin American poetry and religious and national identities.
Hwangpo joined the Hamilton faculty in 1998, after earning a Ph.D. from Yale University. Her main area of specialization is the discourses of national identity in Argentina and Cuba in early 20th century. Her research interests are Latin American literature and culture, 20th century theatre, el sainete criollo, and essay. Her published articles include "Indagación del choteo: un llamado para el cambio en el modo de ser cubano," "José Antonio Ramos y la identidad nacional cubana: sentido, lenguaje y espacio," and "Los inmigrantes: el otro en el teatro argentino de principios del siglo XX."
Angel David Nieves currently co-directs Hamilton's Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) an $800,000. Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant-funded project. He taught in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 2003-2008. Nieves completed his doctoral work in architectural history and Africana Studies at Cornell University in 2001. His co-edited book, ‘We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S. (2008), examines African American efforts to claim space in American society despite fierce resistance. Nieves has published essays in the Journal of Planning History; Places Journal: A Forum of Design for the Public Realm; Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies; and in several edited collections, most recently in Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing With Difficult Heritage (2009). In 2010 he received The John R. Hatch Class of 1925 Excellence in Teaching Award. He is also associate editor of Fire!!!: A Multimedia Journal of Black Studies, an online journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. His digital research and scholarship have also been featured on MSNBC.com and in Newsweek. Nieves’ scholarly work and community-based activism critically engages with issues of memory, heritage preservation, gender and nationalism at the intersections of race and the built environment in cities across the Global South.
Edna M. Rodríguez-Plate, associate professor of Hispanic Studies, completed her bachelor's degree at the University of Puerto Rico, did master’s work at Purdue University and her Ph.D. at Emory University. Her research and teaching begins with basic questions about identity, from individual identities to a collective social-national identity: How are identities constructed, represented and contested culturally, in films, literature and the mass media? How is ideology produced and how does it affect our sense of the world, our world? Rodríguez-Plate specializes in Spanish and Latin American Cinema, contemporary Latin American literature and culture, and Cuban studies. She is the author of Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity, and has written several articles on Cuban film and literature.
Seager's field of study is the religions of the United States. His interests include immigration, ethnicity and religion, and religion and the environment, but he has written most extensively about Asian religions in this country. His first two books were devoted to the World's Parliament of Religion in Chicago in 1893. More recently, he published Buddhism in America (Columbia, 1999), an examination of prominent communities and leading figures in a range of Buddhist traditions currently setting down roots in this country. Seager published his latest book, Encountering the Dharma (University of California Press) in March, 2006. It offers a rare insider's look at Soka Gakkai Buddhism, one of Japan's most influential and controversial religious movements, and one that is experiencing explosive growth around the world.
Back to Latin American Studies overview.
The vast expanse of Latin America's very geography suggests the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The five-course Latin American studies minor draws on the resources of Hamilton's Hispanic studies, history, government, sociology, women's studies and anthropology programs to present the Latin American mosaic in all its diverse dimensions.
The Hamilton program is not about large, anonymous lectures. It brings some of the College's most accomplished faculty members in many fields into small classrooms. There the emphasis is on discussion, one-on-one engagement, and strong writing and research skills.
A familiarity with Latin American language, life, arts and history is of great practical value in an increasingly bilingual and multicultural professional world. But Latin American studies provides its own rich rewards as well. Latin American culture is not "down there." It is part of the fabric of the American life that we all live; to see it more clearly is to see ourselves anew.
The vast expanse of Latin America's very geography suggests the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The five-course Latin American studies minor draws on the resources of Hamilton's Hispanic studies, history, government, sociology, women's studies and anthropology programs to present the Latin American mosaic in all its diverse dimensions.
The Hamilton program is not about large, anonymous lectures. It brings some of the College's most accomplished faculty members in many fields into small classrooms. There the emphasis is on discussion, one-on-one engagement, and strong writing and research skills.
A familiarity with Latin American language, life, arts and history is of great practical value in an increasingly bilingual and multicultural professional world. But Latin American studies provides its own rich rewards as well. Latin American culture is not "down there." It is part of the fabric of the American life that we all live; to see it more clearly is to see ourselves anew.
The vast expanse of Latin America's very geography suggests the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The five-course Latin American studies minor draws on the resources of Hamilton's Hispanic studies, history, government, sociology, women's studies and anthropology programs to present the Latin American mosaic in all its diverse dimensions.
The Hamilton program is not about large, anonymous lectures. It brings some of the College's most accomplished faculty members in many fields into small classrooms. There the emphasis is on discussion, one-on-one engagement, and strong writing and research skills.
A familiarity with Latin American language, life, arts and history is of great practical value in an increasingly bilingual and multicultural professional world. But Latin American studies provides its own rich rewards as well. Latin American culture is not "down there." It is part of the fabric of the American life that we all live; to see it more clearly is to see ourselves anew.
