Leading experts from academia, journalism, and the worlds of policy and advocacy come to CLALS as Research Fellows to advance scholarship and contribute to public debate. Fellows carry out research independently and participate in Center-sponsored initiatives, bringing their expertise to bear on a wide range of issues in Latin American and Latino Studies.
In addition, doctoral candidates planning to undertake research in Washington D.C. related to Latin American or Latino studies are welcome to apply to affiliate with the Center as Research Fellows. The Center cannot provide stipend support, but students accepted to the program receive access to work space at CLALS, the library, and other research infrastructure at American University.
Current Fellows
Tamarys L. Bahamonde
July 2024 - Present
Tamarys Bahamonde holds a Ph.D. in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from the Joseph Biden School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the University of Delaware. She is an economist graduated from the University of Havana and holds a Master in Regional Development from the Univeristy of Camagüey. As a professor at the University of havana, she specialized in Cuban economic thought, business cycle, and labor market. Her research has been published and presented at numerous international and national events in Cuba and the US. She was awarded a Fellowship for the 2017-2018 Academic Year for the Nonprofit Management Scholarship Program for Cuban Citizens (IREX) and the First Prize in the Jorge Pérez-López Graduate and Undergraduate Student Award Competition organized by ASCE in 1018. She was also honored with the Doctoral Fellowship for Excellence for the 2023-2024 Academic Year by the Graduate College at the University of Delaware. Tamarys consistently collaborates with independent media, journals, and organizations on topics related to Cuban politics, economy, and society.
Tamarys' research interests include state decision-making under uncertainty, economic reforms, political economy, and power dynamics in the public policy arena.
Email: tbahamonde@american.edu
Luiza Duarte
September 2020 - Present
Luiza Duarte is a journalist, producer, and political scientist based in New York. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Wilson Center, Brazil Institute, as well as at CLALS. She is collaborating with CLALS staff to research China's efforts to shape perceptions of its role in Latin America.
Duarte has been in the broadcast media industry for 14 years, working in several aspects of production, behind and in front of the cameras, writing print and web articles, and creating multimedia content for traditional and social media platforms. She is the former US correspondent for CNN Brasil. Previously, she worked as the Hong Kong-based Asia correspondent for GloboNews, the main Brazilian pay-TV all-news channel, part of Globo Group, the largest commercial TV network in South America. She covered the Umbrella Movement, Hangzhou G20 Summit, the North Korea–United States Singapore Summit, the civil movement in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019, and many other events in the region. Her research interests include international relations, diplomacy, US-China-Brazil relations, media, cultural policies, environmental policies and national memory. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Sorbonne Nouvelle University – Institute of Latin American Studies (IHEAL). Duarte received her master's from the Panthéon-Assas University French Institute of Press and her bachelor's from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro School of Communication.
Email: lduarte@american.edu
Steven Dudley
September 2010 - Present
Steven Dudley is a Senior Research Fellow for American University who specializes in organized crime and citizen security issues. In addition to managing InSight Crime, which is co-sponsored by CLALS, Dudley is a principal investigator on the Center's project to study transnational criminal networks in Latin America and the Caribbean. He has contributed to a variety of Center projects including the Elites & Power and the Religion & Violence projects.
Dudley is the former Bureau Chief of the Miami Herald in the Andean Region and the author of Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge, 2004). Dudley has also reported from Haiti, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Miami for National Public Radio and The Washington Post, among others. Dudley has a BA in Latin American History from Cornell University and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded the Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2007, is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars during the 2012-2013 academic year.
Specializations:
- Breaking down security issues on-the-ground in conflict situations
- Studying trends and tendencies of organized crime
- Analyzing political crises
- Reporting on corporate social responsibility, environmental subjects, human rights issues
- Investigating international and local justice systems
Email: sdudley@insightcrime.org
Susan Eckstein
July 2024 - Present
Susan Eckstein is an emeritus professor of the Pardee School of Global Studies and the Sociology Department at Boston University. She has written numerous books and articles on Mexican urban poor, political-economic developments in Cuba, Cuban immigrants, immigration policy, impacts of Latin American revolutions, and edited books on Latin American social movements and social rights, and on immigrant impacts in their homelands. Most recently, she published Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America. Previously, she published How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands (co-editor), The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland, What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fiarness in Latin America (co-editor), Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America (co-editor), Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro, Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (editor), The Poverty of Revolution: The State and Urban Poor in Mexico and The Impact of Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of Mexico and Bolivia. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Radcliffe Insititute for Advanced Study, American Council on Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Tinker Foundation, and Christopher Reynolds Foundation. She has received a number of awards for her publications, and was the 2023 recipient of the Latin American Studies Association Kalman Silvert Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Email: seckstei@bu.edu
Andreia Fressatti Cardoso
January 2023 - Present
Andreia Fressatti Cardoso is a political scientist and doctoral student at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has a Master's degree in political science from the State University of Campinas, and a Bachelor's degree in Law from the State University of Maringa, both in Brazil. She has experience in research in political theory and human rights, more specifically in the formation of the subject of rights in the public space. Currently, she has been investigating the formation of rights' subjectivity through dissenting processes, including lawsuits and public demonstrations, funded by a São Paulo Research Foundation's grant.
Email: afcardoso@american.edu
Luciana Gandini
September 2020 - Present
Luciana Gandini is a Research Fellow at CLALS, a Non-resident Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and a full-time tenured researcher at the Legal Research Institute at UNAM in the area of Sociology of Law. She is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI, CONACYT), level II. She coordinates the University Seminar on Studies on Internal Displacement, Migration, Exile and Repatriation (SUDIMER) at UNAM, which promotes research on migration and human mobilities at UNAM. She is a co-author of Caravanas (UNAM, 2020), which was a co-recipient of the 2020 William M. Leogrande Award. In 2018, she received the award "Reconocimiento Distinción Universidad Nacional Jóvenes Investigadores 2018" by UNAM.
Her project, Emerging challenges on immigration policy: the case of Migrant Protection Protocols and other Latin American forced immigrants, aims to identify some of the main public policy challenges on both, human mobility and international protection in the Latin American region and particularly Mexico in a context where the increase on the mobility of people in need of international protection contrasts with the tendency of governments to impose limits on the right of asylum. Additionally, in recent months she has been researching the impacts of the COVID-19 sanitary crisis on the inclusion and effective access and exercise of socio-economic rights of Venezuelan and Central American displaced populations in Latin America and how this situation generates and even more complex scenario and demands reshaping immigration policies through the enforcement of international protection principles.
Luciana is interested in topics related to international migration, development and human rights; (in)voluntary migration and forced migration; Venezuelan exodus and Central American migrant caravans; impacts of COVID-19 on migrant and refugee population; return and skill migration; and qualitative and quantitative social research methods.
Email: lgandini@american.edu
Austin Kocher
March 2023 - Present
Austin Kocher is Research Assistant Professor with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a Syracuse University research institute that uses Freedom of Information Act requests to study the federal government. Key areas of Kocher’s current research at TRAC include federal immigration detention, enforcement and deportation, the immigration court system, and trends within the federal criminal and civil courts. His research also includes grassroots immigrant rights and worker rights movements that seek to push back against deportation as a tool of social and labor control. Kocher is currently chair of the Legal Geography Specialty Group within the American Association of Geographers and is active in the Law and Society Association.
Email: ackocher@syr.edu
Arturo Porzecanski
August 2021 - Present
Dr. Porzecanski, who recently retired from a professorship in international economics at American University (2005-2021), previously taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Williams College. He is an expert in international finance, emerging markets and Latin American economics and politics. Prior to entering academia, he spent most of his professional career working as an international economist on Wall Street.
Dr. Porzecanski was chief economist for emerging markets at ABN AMRO Bank (2000-2005); chief economist for the Americas at ING Bank (1994-2000); chief emerging-markets economist at Kidder, Peabody & Co. (1992-1993); chief economist at Republic National Bank of New York (1989-1992); senior economist at J.P. Morgan Bank (1977-1989); research economist at the Center for Latin American Monetary Studies in Mexico City (1975-1976); and visiting economist at the International Monetary Fund (1973).
Porzecanski carries out and publishes research in international finance; provides consulting services to legal and financial firms, as well as to U.S. government agencies and multilateral institutions; serves on the board of directors of the Tinker Foundation; is a Senior Advisor to the non-profit Emerging Markets Investors Alliance; and is a Dispute Resolution Arbitrator for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. In mid-2020, he was appointed by the White House to the President’s Advisory Commission on Hispanic Prosperity, and in mid-2021 he was named a Global Fellow of The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Email: aporzeca@american.edu
Blair Sackett
July 2024 - Present
Blair conducts research on the intersection of forced migration and social inequality. In a period of rising forced migration, due to war and political upheaval as well as climate change, her work focuses on how organizational policies and programs shape refugee families’ access to rights and resources. She is first author of the book, We Thought It Would Be Heaven: Refugees in an Unequal America (University of California Press), with Annette Lareau, which sheds light on the obstacles that resettled refugees face in accessing social services and economic resources in the United States. Her next book project examines the reverberations of national policy and humanitarian practice on refugee families’ economic strategies and social networks in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship and U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships and covered by media outlets, including NPR’s Planet Money.
Blair was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Email: blair_sackett@brown.edu
Ricardo Torres
August 2021 - Present
Ricardo Torres holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Havana. He was a professor at the Centro de Estudios de la Economía Cubana (CEEC) at the University of Havana for more than 15 years. He has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University (2011), Ohio State University (2012), Columbia University (2013), American University (2015), Universidad de La República (Uruguay, 2016, 2018), the Finnish Central Bank and Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle (2019). He has participated in conferences and courses in universities and research centers in several countries in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the United States, and has published several articles in international journals and books. He was the chief editor of the series Miradas a la Economía Cubana (Views on the Cuban Economy), and a columnist at Progreso Semanal/Progreso Weekly. He is also part of the Editorial Board of the journals Cuban Studies and the International Journal of Cuban Studies. He develops his research around economic development, system reform and industrial policies.
Email: rtorres@american.edu
Joaquim Tres
April 2024 - Present
Joaquim Tres is a senior research fellow at CLALS specializing on international migration and multilateral and bilateral development from public policy and investment perspectives. Previously, he held several positions at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC, including contributing to the establishment of its International Migration Program as a response to the Latin American migration crises with a current investment portfolio of over US$1.5 billion. For over a decade, he headed the IDB’s Regional Public Goods Initiative to promote collective solutions to shared development challenges through South-South Cooperation. He also served as Technical Secretary of the Pacific Alliance Council of Finance Ministers. In Latin America, he was Country Representative of the Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation (AECID) in Bolivia, Guatemala-Belize, and Mexico. He also had specialist positions in Peru and UNCTAD Geneva, where he carried out international debt economic research for its annual Trade & Development Report. He has extensively written strategic policy documents on migration, trade, foreign direct investment, regional integration, and development cooperation in Latin America, topics on which he also developed and taught courses for edX.org and Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals-IBEI and written corresponding dissemination pieces. He holds a BA from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and an MPhil (Development Economics) from the IDS-Sussex, where he served on its Board of Trustees. He also served on the boards of CIDOB-Barcelona and IBEI. He is currently a member of the Work4Progress Advisory Committee of Fundacion La Caixa, Spain.
Email: joaquim_tres@hotmail.com
Maximiliano Vejares
July 2024 - Present
Maximiliano holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research examines how state and non-state actors build authority across time and space, the causes and consequences of state capacity, and transitions to democracy. Maximiliano's dissertation and book project investigate how subnational regions' economic, military, and ecological factors explain variation in states’ projection of authority by the late 19th century. In separate projects, Maximiliano re-examines the role of traditional oligarchies in first-wave transitions to democracy and explores the origins of the recent rise in illicit economies in Latin America. At Johns Hopkins, his research was supported by the SNF Agora Institute, the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (LACLxS), the 21st Century Cities Initiative, and the Nicole Suveges Fieldwork Fellowship. Before coming to the United States, Maximiliano developed a career in Chile's non-profit and government sectors, leading projects related to immigration and electoral spending.
Email: maxvejares@gmail.edu
Sonja Wolf
October 2024 - Present
Sonja Wolf holds a PhD in International Politics (Aberystwyth University) and is a Research Professor at the Panamerican University in Mexico City. Between 2014 and 2023 she was a CONAHCYT Research Fellow commissioned to the Drug Policy Program at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Previously, she held research positions at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the Institute for Security and Democracy (INSYDE) in Mexico City. She has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Latin America and Caribbean Centre (LACC) of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a Research Associate with the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford.
Dr. Wolf’s research interests focus on gangs, violence, and migration, especially in Mexico and Central America. She is the author of Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador (University of Texas Press, 2017) as well as the director of The Vertical Border (Mexico, 2022), a feature documentary on forced migration, and Collateral (Mexico, 2024), a fiction short film on military mental health.
Email: swolf@american.edu