tardanic@fiu.edu	Richard Tardanico, Associate Professor and Chair Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1979 Dr. Tardanico's current research centers on Central America, and focuses on issues such as neoliberal restructuring and the poor; urbanization and social inequality; sustainable agriculture and campesino households. He has published on Mexico, Colombia and Costa Rica where he was a Fulbright scholar (1985-87). Following his Fulbright, he studied the contemporary interplay of the world political economy on Latin American cities. His edited books include Crises in the Caribbean Basin; Global Restructuring, Employment, and Social Inequality in Urban Latin America; and Poverty or Development: Global Restructuring and Regional Transformations in the US South and the Mexican South (with Mark B. Rosenberg). His publications have appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Politics and Society, Theory and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
aysam@fiu.edu	Maria Aysa-Lastra, Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania Professor Aysa-Lastra is a social demographer and a specialist on international migration. Her current research investigates the consequences of economic crisis and political violence on internal and international migration flows and resettlement, return and integration practices. She has focused particularly on the contemporary Colombian case. After receiving her Bachelors in Economics at ITAM and Masters in Public Policy at Georgetown University she went to University of Pennsylvania to pursue her Ph.D. in demography. At the Population Studies Center she had the opportunity to collaborate in large migration and aging projects. She has done research on comparative international migration from Latin American and the Caribbean to the United States and collaborated with the International Organization for Migration in collecting data to further understand the effects of international migration in the areas of origin, particularly the actual and potential use of migrant remittances and the raise of transnational communities. She has published articles in Colombia, Mexico and the United States. As a social demographer Maria will teach research methods for the social sciences, international migration, population theory and demographic methods.
jbbrown@gate.net	Jerry B. Brown, Founding Professor Ph.D., Cornell University, 1972 Dr. Brown is an applied anthropologist whose research focuses on energy policy, environmental health, and social movements. He is currently writing a book on The Prometheus Project, which describes how America can significantly decrease dependence on foreign oil in ten years.  Dr. Brown is co-author of Profiles in Power: The Antinuclear Movement and the Dawn of the Solar Age, and of journal articles on radiation, public health and energy. Over the past three decades, he has worked with innovative public interest organizations, such as Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers union, Business Executives for National Security, and the Radiation and Public Health Project. Dr. Brown is a Fellow of the World Business Academy, whose mission is to explore the unique role that business leaders can play in shaping a positive and sustainable global future. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Environmental Studies Program and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and a Researcher with the Global Entrepreneurship Center. Dr. Brown has won several teaching awards at the University and teaches courses on Cultural Anthropology, Society and Technology, and Social Movements.
jerazo@fiu.edu	Juliet S. Erazo, Assistant Professor Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2003 Dr. Erazo’s research examines the history of indigenous organizing in the Ecuadorian Amazon with particular attention to how indigenous leaders have worked to shape their constituents’ land use practices, property regimes, and identities. She uses a variety of archives, including written documents, aerial photographs, and satellite images, to illuminate the data she gathers through oral history interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. More broadly, she is interested in environmental politics and history, the relationships between international development philosophies and local practices, and state-society relations.  She has published collaboratively-written articles in The Journal of Political Ecology and Conservation Biology; sole-authored chapters in two edited volumes (Economies and Transformations of Landscapes and Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador), and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Constructing Autonomy: Indigenous Organizations and Their Utopian Projects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, 1964-2000.
fjellman@fiu.edu	Stephen M. Fjellman, Professor Ph.D., Stanford University, 1971 Dr. Fjellman is a post postmodernist, seeking some understanding in the world without throwing up his hands in random dismay. When pressed, he claims to be an anthropologist. His most important field site is World Disney World. He is a member of the Church of Baseball, the Mickey Mouse Club, and the Fellowship of the Ecology of Mind. He has published in 11 fields and subfields, among them linguistic, mathematical, psychological, and social anthropology, social theory, African Studies, culture studies, science fiction studies, technology studies, American studies, and Disney Studies. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America is worth reading. Among his works is A Little Baseball Music: Journey to the Heartland, available at this website. He has won all the teaching awards available at the University and his main life interest is in undergraduate education. He directs the Honors College Study Abroad Program in Italy.
girardc@fiu.edu	Chris Girard, Associate Professor Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1988 Dr. Girard is a specialist in quantitative methods. His research interests have a wide focus, although in recent years the major emphasis has been on race and ethnicity. With funds granted by the WAGES Board, he is currently examining the fate of individuals leaving welfare in Miami-Dade County. The study analyzes differences between Cubans and Blacks with regard to their finding jobs and rising out of poverty. Dr. Girard has also investigated the effect racial segregation has had on the relocation of blacks away from areas damaged by Hurricane Andrew. Single-author publications include an article in the American Sociological Review: "Age, Gender, and Suicide: A Cross-National Analysis", as well as a research note on suicide in the American Journal of Sociology. Another area that Dr. Girard has investigated is sexual risk-taking among adolescents, resulting in an article in the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth. Earlier in his career, he published on health maintenance organizations and health services management. He teaches courses on race and ethnicity, marriage and the family, social problems, and advanced research methods.
gladwin@fiu.edu	Hugh Gladwin, Associate Professor Ph.D., Stanford University, 1970. Director, Institute for Public Opinion Research Dr. Gladwin directs FIU's Institute for Public Opinion Research. His main interest is the application of survey research and cultural analysis to understand culturally and demographically diverse urban settings. A particular interest is to model interaction between the human population and natural systems such as the South Florida ecosystem and extreme natural events like hurricanes. As someone who is both anthropologist and survey researcher, he finds geographic information systems (GIS) the most useful research tool, one that enables ethnography to communicate with statistical sampling in studying regions inhabited by millions of people. He is a co-editor of Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Sociology of Disaster.
Liliana.Goldin@fiu.edu	Liliana Goldín, Professor Ph.D., State University of New York - Albany, 1986. Dr. Goldín’s research focuses on issues related to economic restructuring in rural Latin America, economic strategies of Maya and non-Maya people in Guatemala, and the processes of economic and cultural change. Recent projects include the study of economic and social differentiation in a garment producing township of western Guatemala, the socioeconomic impact of non-traditional agricultural exports in townships of the central highlands of Guatemala, and the economic strategies of very poor women in a peripheral area of Guatemala City. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Ideology in Production: A Cultural Economy of Rural Guatemala where she explores attitudes towards the economy in the context of various economic practices. She is also interested in the labor conditions that Latin American migrants encounter in the United States and the processes of identity formation in the context of transnationalism. Her books include Procesos Globales en el Campo de Guatemala. Opciones Económicas y Transformaciones Ideológicas. and Identities on the Move: Transnational Processes in North America and the Caribbean Basin.
grenierg@fiu.edu	Guillermo J. Grenier, Professor Ph.D., University of New Mexico, 1985 Dr. Grenier was born in Havana, Cuba, and received his undergraduate education at Emory University and Georgia State University in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Inhuman Relations: Quality Circles and Anti-Unionism in American Industry. Other books include Employee Participation and Labor Law in the American Workplace; Miami Now: Immigration, Ethnicity and Social Change; Newcomers in the Workplace:Immigrants and the Restructuring of the US Economy; and This Land is Our Land: Newcomers and Established Residents in Miami. He has written numerous articles on labor and ethnic issues in the United States and conducts yearly surveys on the attitudes of the Cuban-American community towards Cuba.
kincaidd@fiu.edu	A. Douglas Kincaid, Associate Professor Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 1987 Vice-Provost for International Affairs Dr. Kincaid's principal interests as a sociologist have concerned the political economy of development in Latin America, and especially Central America, a region he has studied and visited regularly since the mid-1970s. His most recent research was undertaken as lead consultant for Central America 2020, a joint US-European project to devise a regional development model with a 20-year time frame, and he co-authored the project's final report, published in October 2000. He is active in the American Sociological Association, for which he currently serves as ASA representative to the International Sociological Association, and in the Latin American Studies Association, for which he chairs the LASA 21st Century Task Force. From 1986 to 2000, he was associate director and then research director of FIU's Latin American and Caribbean Center. In fall 2000, he was appointed Vice Provost for International Studies, in which position he has lead academic responsibility for all aspects of the university's international studies programs and relationships with foreign institutions.
lavender@fiu.edu	Abraham D. Lavender, Professor Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1972 Dr. Lavender is a sociologist specializing in ethnicity, emphasizing the Jewish community, but also including Hispanic (mostly Cuban) politics in Miami-Dade, black culture in Miami-Dade, and French Huguenots. Five of his six books study ethnicity (see link to CV). Studying descendants of secret Jews of the Spanish-Portuguese diaspora is a special interest. He has received outstanding teacher awards, and shows his love of teaching by having one of the department's heaviest teaching loads including ethnicity, sexuality, social deviance, political sociology, and sociology through film. Dr. Lavender has applied his sociology in Miami Beach as special assistant to the mayor, vice-chair of the Housing Authority, chair of the Homeless Committee, and founding president of the Miami Beach Historical Association. As president of the local Phi Beta Kappa Association, he worked diligently to help FIU obtain a PBK chapter for its students. Dr. Lavender is president of the national Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies.
levineb@fiu.edu	Barry B. Levine, Professor Ph.D., Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, 1973. Dr. Levine's main theoretical interest is the relationship between society and the individual; particularly the degree to which societies foster or thwart human vitality. This is one of the issues behind his widely regarded Benjy Lopez, A Picaresque Tale of Emigration and Return, as well as behind his work-in-progress, Who Gets to Make What for Whom: Teddy Snyder in the Age of Sociology. He was editor of the award-winning Caribbean Review. Among his publications are: El desafío neoliberal: el fin de tercermundismo en América Latina; The New Cuban Presence in the Caribbean; The Caribbean Exodus; and Problemas de desiguldad social en Puerto Rico. He teaches graduate and undergraduate theory courses, is the department webster and faculty advisor to the department's graduate student society. He is a Founding Professor of the University.
mahlers@fiu.edu	Sarah J. Mahler, Associate Professor Ph.D., Columbia University, 1992 Dr. Mahler is a cultural anthropologist and a specialist on international migration and the transnational ties that migrants sustain and build between their homelands and their adoptive countries. Her research has focused primarily on migrations from Central America and the Caribbean to the United States. In recent years she has pioneered research on how gender relations are negotiated transnationally and co-authored a special volume of the journal Identities: Global Studies on Culture and Power in 2001. She is currently studying the role religion plays in the lives of different immigrant groups in Miami and the transnational religious ties that link several countries, including Cuba and Nicaragua, to Miami. Among her publications are two books documenting the lives of Salvadorans in the U.S., American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins and Salvadorans in Suburbia.
martink@fiu.edu	Kathleen R. Martín, Associate Professor Ph.D., Bryn Mahr, 1977 Dr. Martín is an area specialist in Latin American Studies, particularly Mexico. She is working on a book, Discarded Pages: My Life and Works as a Maya Poet and Political Activist, Araceli Cab Sumi. Her research centers on indigenous issues, gender, sustainable development and politics. She is the 1999 winner of the Sturgis Leavitt Award, and has held a Fulbright Fellowship as well as grants from the Inter-American Foundation, the Organization of American States, the Mellon Foundation, and the North-South Center. A recent publication is "Never Again a Mexico without Us: Indigenous Peoples and the 21st Century".
OgdenL@fiu.edu	Laura Ogden, Assistant Professor Ph.D. University of Florida, 2002 Dr. Ogden is interested in how people invest "natural" landscapes with cultural significance. Her current research is with gladesmen in the Florida Everglades, white settlers who traditionally supported themselves by alligator hunting and commercial fishing. In her research, she documents how the gladesmen's Everglades resonates with economic, historic and mythic associations. She also explores how these "local" landscape constructions intersect with and diverge from ecological or scientific understandings. She is the co-author (with Glen Simmons) of an oral history Gladesmen: Alligator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers and is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Ashley Gang: A Landscape Poetics. Her areas of interest include the history and theory of ethnography, experimental writing, and environmental anthropology (particularly political ecology and landscape approaches). In addition, she works with state and federal agencies involved in Everglades Restoration initiatives to develop social science research planning and public engagement strategies
patilv@fiu.edu	Vrushali Patil, Assistant Professor (Joint Appointment with Women's Studies) Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park, 2006 Dr. Patil is interested in exploring categories of identity such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, culture and nation, their interrelationships, and how they are formed and reformed within historical processes of globalization.  She is particularly interested in how such categories of identity were formed within European imperialism and colonialism and how they continue to be negotiated by people in the so-called Third World.  She is also interested in the South Asian diaspora.  She is author of the forthcoming book, Negotiating Decolonization in the United Nations: Politics of Space, Identity and International Community.
perezl@fiu.edu	Lisandro Pérez, Professor Ph.D., University of Florida, 1974 Dr. Pérez has a lifelong interest in Cuban migration to the U.S., the dynamics of the Cuban-American community, and social change in Cuba. His writings have appeared in the Latin American Research Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and the International Migration Review. He is the editor of the journal Cuban Studies and the co-author of The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the U.S. In 1991, he founded FIU’s Cuban Research Institute and developed it into the premier academic center in the U.S. for the study of Cuba and Cuban Americans, serving as its director until 2003. From 1997 to 1998 he was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. For the 2004-2005 academic year, Dr. Pérez has been awarded a Mel and Lois Tukman Fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library for research on the Cuban community in New York City during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He is currently on leave of absence.
stablem@fiu.edu	Marifeli Pérez-Stable, Professor Ph.D., State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1985 Marifeli Pérez-Stable is a professor of sociology at Miami’s Florida International University and vice president for democratic governance at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC. She is an editorial contributor to the Miami Herald; her column on Latin American issues appears every other Thursday. Tiempos del Mundo publishes her biweekly column. Her opinion pieces have appeared in El País (Spain), El Clarín (Argentina), Excelsior (Mexico), El Nuevo Herald, The New Republic, and The Nation. Dr. Pérez-Stable was a Fulbright fellow at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset in Madrid (2001) and a visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Relations (2003). She is the author of The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (Oxford University Press, 1993; 2nd edition 1999); a Spanish-language edition was published by Editorial Colibrí (Madrid, 1998). She edited the forthcoming reader, “Looking Forward: Cuba’s Pending Transition in Comparative Perspective,” to be published by the University of Notre Dame Press. In November 2006, Editorial Colibrí will issue it in Spanish. Dr. Pérez-Stable chaired the Task Force on Memory, Truth, and Justice which published the report, Cuban National Reconciliation, in April 2003 (http://memoria.fiu.edu). She is the director of “National Dialogues on Democracy in Latin America,” a project sponsored by the Inter-American Dialogue with the cooperation of the Organization of American States. Her works in progress include a political biography of Fidel Castro (Polity Press) and “Intimate Enemies: the United States and Cuba after the Cold War” (Routledge).
jrahier@fiu.edu	Jean Muteba Rahier, Associate Professor Director, Graduate Program Ph.D., Université de Paris X, Nanterre, France, 1994 Editor, Journal of Latin American Anthropology As a social and cultural anthropologist, Dr. Rahier's primary focus is on identity processes in the African diaspora in Latin America. His approach to the study of identity processes is through the analysis of festivities and rituals, beauty contests, oral traditions, the imagination of plantation history, the analysis of representations of blackness in the press as well as the representations of Africa and Africans in films. Most of his fieldwork has been in the Province of Esmeraldas and the Chota-Mira Valley, Ecuador. Dr. Rahier was born in what was then the Belgian Congo, from a Congolese mother and a Belgian father and. grew up in Belgium. He is planning research on inter-racial intimacy in the Belgian Congo; this has led to study of the Belgian Congo archives now located in Brussels. His courses all relate to Africa and or the African diaspora. Dr. Rahier coordinates international graduate summer seminar, "Interrogating the African Diaspora" which is funded by the Ford Foundation, 2004-06.
stepick@fiu.edu	Alex Stepick, Professor Ph.D., University of California at Irvine, 1974 Director, Immigration and Ethnicity Institute Dr. Stepick has researched the impact of immigration on Miami for the past 20 years. His coauthored book, City on the Edge, on how immigration has changed Miami, won both the Robert Park Award for the best book in Urban Sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for the best book in Urban Anthropology. A recent work is Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States. The AAA and the Society for Applied Anthropology awarded him the Margaret Mead Award for his research on Haitian refugees. He received the largest grant ever in Cultural Anthropology from the National Science Foundation. He recently served a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Immigrant Children and Health and on the Cultural Anthropology Panel of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Stepick has testified before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee Affairs and his work has been used by the British House of Commons.
westl@fiu.edu	Lois West, Associate Professor Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1989 Dr. West has published three books and numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of gender, Asian Studies, labor, and development. Her books include Militant Labor in the Philippines (Temple University Press 1997) and an edited collection, Feminist Nationalism (Routledge Press 1997). She has a recent article in the Spring 2001 issue of The Journal of Men's Studies on male drinking subcultures, and is working on a book on American gender relations.
wiedmand@fiu.edu	Dennis Wiedman, Associate Professor Ph.D. University of Oklahoma, 1979 Coordinator, Undergraduate Program Dr. Wiedman is coordinator of the undergraduate program in the department. His interests include medical anthropology, North American Indians, organizational culture, applied anthropology, and ecological anthropology. A special research interest is the increase of diabetes with modernization. His fieldwork extends from the Seminole of South Florida, to the Delaware, Apache, and Cherokee of Oklahoma, to the Inupiat of Alaska. Publications include Ethnohistory: A Researcher's Guide, as well as articles in Human Organization, Medical Anthropology, and the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. He was co-general editor of the NAPA Bulletin, and treasurer of the Society for Applied Anthropology. He is on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association.