Latin American Studies
The Latin American section of the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has strong resources, and offers one of the best graduate history programs in the Midwest that is competitive, as well, with other major universities in the U.S.
The History Department's depth of staffing offers a strong field in Latin America with compatible thematic fields in comparative colonialism, labor history, gender, women's studies, religion and society, and environmental history. The Latin American field emphasizes regionalism, economic history, and the history of ideas in addition to the individual strengths of its faculty. Nils Jacobsen works on eighteenth to twentiethcentury Peru, R. Jovita Baber works on colonial Latin American and Early Modern Spain, and Joseph Love, late nineteenth and twentieth century Brazil, as well as economic policy across Latin America. Jacobsen's Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano, 1780-1930 (U. Calif. Press, 1993), is an important contribution to the intersection of economic and social history that reinterprets the effect of regional export economies on Indian communities, estate formation, and power structures. His current research concerns social movements, revolution, and politics in late nineteenthcentury Peru. Baber is in the process of finishing a book manuscript The construction of Empire: Law, Politics and Community in Tlaxcala, New Spain (1520-1640). In it, she challenges the perception that imperial institutions and structures were imposed on native communities by examining the legal and political activities of the Tlaxcalans and showing how their actions shaped the emerging imperial system. Love has written two works on political and economic regionalism in Brazil; his most recent book is Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil (Stanford U. Press, 1996), a study in the comparative history of ideas, ideologies, and policies. His current research concerns the rise and decline of the Latin American structuralist school of economics, associated with the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL).
Latin American studies provides a strong base at the University of Illinois. The campus has sixty "core" Latin Americanist faculty in two dozen different departments and colleges, with special depth in anthropology, Spanish-and-Portuguese, economics, and history. In addition to its faculty, the University of Illinois has a number of outstanding resources for the study of Latin American history: foremost is its library, ranking with those of Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, Harvard and Yale, housing some nine million volumes. Its holdings include the country's third largest Latin American collection (and the largest in the Midwest), with some 360,000 volumes on Latin America. There is a full staff of bibliographers and catalogers on Latin America, and the head of the Latin American acquisitions department makes frequent trips to the region. The library furthermore has uptodate electronic searching, and has such useful tools as all LAMP-microfilmed newspapers from the region; copies of all Ann Arbor Microfilmed dissertations on Latin America; and the CD ROM, Latin American Studies now regularly updated. (One CD contains a complete run of the 25 years of the Hispanic American Periodicals Index, systematically indexing 250 humanities and social science journals on Latin America, plus the complete card catalog of the University of Texas Latin American [Benson] Collection.) Terminals anywhere on campus provide immediate access to lists of holdings of research libraries in the United States, Latin America, and around the world.
Email and internet services furthermore provide specialized networks for research exchanges and daily news reports for almost all of the Latin American countries. History graduate students have access to the most uptodate desktop computers and programs in the Department of History, which is connected to the University mainframe and the world through hardwired machines; students also have at their disposal the full array of computing services at the Social Science Quantitative Laboratory and the Digital Computing Laboratory.
On the cultural side, Latin American musicians frequently perform at the several theatres and concert halls on campus. Among the five art galleries and three museums at the University, of special interest to Latin Americanists is the outstanding precolumbian collection at the Krannert Art Museum.
The Department of History offers a variety of graduate fellowships as well as research and teaching assistantships. Faculty members also assist students in finding outside foundation or government fellowships through handson writing and rewriting of fellowship proposals and departmentwide wokshops with faculty and peer review. Of special interest are the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships offered by the Latin American Center. That unit typically awards seven fellowships per year to graduate students across the campus, and a large majority of them are given to students in the social sciences and humanities. Latin American history graduate students are highly competitive for national fellowships, having received Fulbright-Hays and SSRC awards in recent years.
Indeed, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, of which Jacobsen is the Director, offers a variety of programs of interest to graduate students. It offers courses in Quechua, Latin America's most widely spoken indigenous language, taught by a native speaker and trained linguist. The Center forms a consortium with its counterpart at the University of Chicago, in which Illinois is the contractor, and UC the subcontractor. Students on either campus can take courses at the other institution. The joint center has been repeatedly designated a National Resource Center by the Department of Education since 1976, and such federal support at Illinois dates back to 1965. Among other things the U. I. Center, together with other campus units, brings Latin American and Latin Americanist speakers, performers, and exhibits to campus.
The Center also supports faculty and student research. Of particular interest to entering graduate students is a program sponsored by the Tinker Foundation and the University, allowing most graduate students to spend a summer researching in Latin America after their first year's course work. The program helps students perfect their language skills, learn how to work at relevant archives and other Latin American institutions, and form international scholarly ties of use throughout their careers. This initial field experience also tends to make them dedicated Latin Americanists. The Latin American program in history has a good record of placing its graduate students in tenuretrack positions, partly because of a conscious effort to keep the number of entering students small. We typically have an entering class of no more than three graduate students in Latin American history, and thus students have extensive access to their professors for seminar work and individual mentoring that is lacking in some larger programs. We believe the high facultystudent ratio and the personal attention students receive have given our graduates an important advantage in the academic job market.