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, to the library and to other research infrastructure at American University.

Download the Research Fellow application.

John Ackerman

John Ackerman is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (IIJ-UNAM) and Vice President of the International Association of Administrative Law. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College. He is an expert in the topics of democratic transition, accountability, election law, state reform, public policy and citizen participation. Ackerman is Editor-in-Chief of the Mexican Law Review and a bi-weekly columnist for the newsweekly Proceso and the daily La Jornada.

Ackerman has been a Senior Consultant for the World Bank and was coordinator of the National Working Group on Transparency, Oversight and Accountability of the National Fiscal Convention in Mexico. He has also been a consultant with USAID, OECD, UNDP, Global Integrity, International Budget Project, Open Society Institute and in Mexico with the Secretary of the Public Function, the Supreme Court, the Chamber of Deputies and the Government of Mexico City. He has received funding for his research from the Fulbright Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the University of California Institute on Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS).

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Leslie Elliot Armijo

Leslie Elliott Armijo (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) studies the intersection of democratic politics and capitalist markets, as revealed by the economic policy decisions of large emerging powers, especially the “Latin American 7” of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Armijo has a longstanding interest in promoting the participation of a wider range of countries in global economic governance (see Financial Globalization and Democracy in Emerging Markets, 1999 and Debating the Global Financial Architecture, 2002), and argues that democratic consolidation in developing countries helps mitigate the incidence and costs of economic crisis (see “Two Dimensions of Democracy and the Economy,” with C. Gervasoni, 2010). Her current project (with Sybil Rhodes) is Contending Visions of the Americas: Regional Public Policies of the United States, Venezuela, and Brazil, which explores cooperation and competition in the international policy arenas of energy, finance, immigration, and defense. She also holds a Visiting Scholar appointment at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University. Leslie’s website is: www.lesliearmijo.org

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Fulton Armstrong

Before joining the Center as a Senior Fellow, Fulton T. Armstrong followed Latin American affairs for almost 30 years in a number of U.S. government positions. He served as a senior professional staff member responsible for Latin America on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from July 2008 to October 2011, where he also worked closely with the committee’s investigations team. Prior to that, he served in the Executive Branch in a series of policy and analytical positions. Among other senior positions, he was National Intelligence Officer for Latin America – the U.S. Intelligence Community’s most senior analyst – in 2000-2004, and he served for six months as the chief of staff of the DCI Crime and Narcotics Center. He served two terms as the Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council (1995 97 and 1998-99), between which he was Deputy NIO for Latin America. In 1980-84 he worked for U.S. Representative Jim Leach (R-Iowa). He has spent 11 years studying and working in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He speaks Spanish and Chinese.

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John Dinges

Reporter, author and correspondent for many years in Latin America, John Dinges is the author of three books on Latin America, the most recent of which is The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, The New Press 2004, 2005(also published in Spanish as Operación Cóndor: Una Década de Terrorismo Internacional en el Cono Sur, Ediciones B 2004). Dinges is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. He is co-founder of the Centro de Investigación e Información Periodística (CIPER), Santiago, Chile, which began operation in May 2007, and executive director of the non-profit Center for Investigation and Information (CIINFO).

During his time as a CLALS Research Fellow, Dinges is working on a two-year research project, "Media and Democracy in Latin America: Beyond Freedom of Expression,” focused on press freedom in so-called “illiberal democracies”: Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. The project will break free of the traditional lens in most studies of looking at press freedom as an end in itself. It will look at the actions and standards of the press as well as of the governments, exploring how both sides are either furthering or damaging democracy.

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Steven Dudley

Steven Dudley is the former Bureau Chief for The Miami Herald in the Andean region and the author of Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge 2004). Dudley has reported from Haiti, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Miami for National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and the BBC’s The World; and written feature articles for The Washington Post Magazine, The Economist, Columbia Journalism Review, The Progressive, and The Nation. Steven was also the recipient of Stanford University’s Knight Fellowship in 2007. He is currently serving as the co-director of a new initiative, InSight Crime–a website that monitors, analyzes and investigates organized crime and its increasingly destructive role in Latin America. This initiative is co-sponsored by American University's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies.

Specializations:

• Breaking down security issues on-the-ground in conflict situations (PDF)  
• Studying trends and tendencies of organized crime (PDF)  
• Analyzing political crises (PDF)  
• Reporting on corporate social responsibility (PDF), environmental subjects (PDF), human rights issues (PDF)  
• Investigating international (PDF) and local justice systems (PDF)

Steven Dudley Resume (PDF)

E-mail: sdudley@insightcrime.org

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Patricia Foxen

Patricia Foxen, PhD, is the Associate Director of Research at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR). She is responsible for leading NCLR’s strategy for policy-driven research and for developing and implementing a research agenda around Latino children and youth, discrimination, and social integration. Dr. Foxen is a cultural and medical anthropologist who has taught at Vanderbilt University and the University of Toronto. Her research areas of interest include migration and forced displacement, health and psychosocial well-being of immigrant and refugee families, cultures of Latin America and Latino communities in North America. She has worked extensively with Central American immigrant and refugee populations in the US and Canada and has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, the Journal of Refugee Studies, and Anthropology and Medicine, among others. She is the author of the book In Search of Providence: Transnational Mayan Identities (Vanderbilt University Press 2007), which describes the experiences of K'iche' Indians who have migrated from highland Guatemala to Providence, Rhode Island. Prior to becoming an anthropologist Dr. Foxen worked in the area of maternal and child health and family planning in Latin America and Mexico. She speaks fluent Spanish and French and has lived in Europe, Canada and Central America. Dr. Foxen received a Doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology and a Master’s degree in Medical Anthropology from McGill University, a Master’s of Public Health from Colombia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Bryn Mawr College.

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Benjamin Francis-Fallon

Benjamin Francis-Fallon (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is a historian and teacher whose interests center on the politics of immigration and ethnicity in the United States of America. His doctoral dissertation, currently being revised for publication, explores the origins and development of the “Hispanic Vote.” It examines how leaders from grassroots activists to U.S. presidents approached the task of convincing Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Latino populations to act as one, and shows that political organizing was crucial in defining and institutionalizing Latino identity in the United States in the decades after World War II. It demonstrates how pan-Hispanic politics altered both Democratic and Republican strategies, transformed public policy, made “Hispanic” an official category of American citizen, and helped redefine the United States as a multicultural nation.

Dr. Francis-Fallon teaches courses on U.S. immigration and ethnic history, Latino history, and U.S. political history at Georgetown University. Previously, he taught social studies and Spanish language to the charming and hopeful students of Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, New York.

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Alba M. Hesselroth

Alba Hesselroth holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Southern California, a Masters in Law (LLM) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a law degree from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. Her areas of specialization are international political economy and Latin America. She is assistant professor at Lewis University, Department of Political Science where she has taught since 2007. Previously she taught at Wheaton College (Illinois) and was a visiting professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. Courses taught include international relations, comparative government, introduction to international law, international political economy, and Latin American politics.

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Patricia Legarreta

Patricia Legarreta is a Ph.D. candidate at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico. Her dissertation, Culture, Development and International Cooperation in the Papaloapan Basin: From Inter-American Indigenismo to Global Multiculturalism, focuses on the dynamics of international cooperation between Mexican and American anthropologists and national, multilateral, public and private institutions in Cold War development programs, as well as the continuities and transformations in the neoliberal era. She has a Masters degree in Social Anthropology (Centro de Investigación y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Mexico), with a specialization in public policy and the political, economic, cultural and generational transformations that infrastructure (highways, dams, electricity, etc.) carried to the Chinantec region of Oaxaca, Mexico. She has worked as a researcher on indigenous and cultural legislation for the Centro de Estudios Sociales y de Opinión Pública of the Mexican Congress, and has been a professor of rural studies, Mexican political economy, and fieldwork methodologies at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

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Javier Meléndez

Javier Meléndez has more than 15 years of experience in governance, and is a specialist in the areas of national security and citizen security. In 2004, he founded the Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policies (Instituto de Estudios Estratégicos y Políticas Públicas, IEEPP), an independent Nicaraguan think-tank and advocacy organization dedicated to security reform and public sector transparency in Nicaragua and Central America. As the Executive Director of IEEPP from 2004 to 2009, he led investigations on security-sector reform measures in Nicaragua and throughout Central America, managed budget transparency programs, and trained Nicaraguan legislators on budget analysis. Before taking on the executive direction of IEEPP, Mr. Meléndez served as an advisor to the Nicaraguan Defense Ministry and helped organize the citizen consultation process for the White Book of Nicaragua’s Defense and National Security. He also worked as a program officer for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington, D.C. and as a coordinator for the Center for Strategic Studies in Nicaragua. Mr. Meléndez has published, coordinated and edited more than a dozen research works on defense, public security, international affairs, organized crime and public sector transparency. He has also advised and served as a consultant for the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress in Costa Rica, the British Department for International Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-LIREC), and the Organization of American States on citizen security, governance, political party modernization and transparency issues. In 2009, Mr. Meléndez was part of the executive committee for Human Development Report, “Opening spaces to citizen security and human development for Central America.” Since September 2010, he has served as a consultant for the Center for Naval Analysis, and collaborator for the research center “Insight Crime” of the American University in Washington DC.

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Caroline Moser

As an urban social anthropologist and social policy specialist, Caroline Moser has more than forty years of experience relating to urban development and social policy on a range of issues, including academic and policy-focused research, teaching and training. She has undertaken primary field-based research on urban poverty, urban violence, household asset vulnerability and accumulation strategies, gender and development and the informal sector in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Jamaica. Moser has taught at the London School of Economics, the New School and University College London. Prior to coming to the University of Manchester, she worked at the World Bank, the Overseas Development Institute and the Brookings Institution. She has also served as Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, a Research Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York and an Advisor to the Ford Foundation's Global Urban Research Initiative. Moser currently leads research projects exploring the tipping points of urban violence and asset planning.

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Antoine Perret

Antoine Perret is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy in the Department of Law. His principal research interests are on the regulation of private military and/or security companies (PMSCs). Building on three years of work on security and human rights in Colombia, he is now focusing on the rule of law and accountability mechanisms at the regional level in Latin America, with a particular focus on the Inter-American System of Human Rights. In addition, he is studying the impact in Latin America of international initiatives on PMSCs, such as the UN draft convention and the Swiss Initiative on PMSCs. Perret received his MA in International Affairs from the Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia and BA in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland.

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Fernando Rojas

Fernando Rojas earned his Master's degree in Public Administration (M.P.A.) at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; his LL.M. at Harvard Law School; International Tax Program Certificate at Harvard Law School; and completed Law Studies at the Law School, Rosario University in Bogota, Colombia. Prior to joining CLALS, Rojas worked for 12 years with the World Bank as a Lead Public Sector Management Specialist for the Latin America and the Caribbean (LCR) Region, working on a wide range of topics such as state reform, fiscal decentralization, public management and institutional development, both at national and subnational levels in countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.

Fernando Rojas’ publications include Elementos de Finanzas Publicas en Colombia, Temis, Bogotá 1985 (with O. Alviar); "Economia Publica Contemporánea: Restructuración Gradual e Imperceptible de una Disciplina” (ESAP, Bogota, 1996); “The Demand for Governance and Quality of Government”, “At the Crossroads of Decentralization: Recentralization, Federalization”, “Reform of Public Administration and of the State in Colombia”, in Colombia: The Economic Foundations of Peace (The World Bank 2003); and “Partnering for Services in Santa Cruz, Bolivia” and “Partnering for Services for Planning and Management in Cali, Colombia”, in Leadership and Innovation in Subnational Government, Case Studies from Latin America (WBI Development Studies, The World Bank 2003).

Irma Sandoval

Irma Sandoval is a Professor at the Institute for Social Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and an international expert in transparency, corruption control and political economy. She currently serves as Director of the Laboratory for the Documentation and Analysis of Corruption and Transparency at UNAM and was the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Manuel Espinosa Yglesias award for her academic work in political economy. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz as well as an M.A. in Latin American Studies from UNAM. She has two B.A.s, one in Economics from UNAM and the other in Sociology from the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City (UAM). 

Her most recent books include: Contemporary Debates on Corruption & Transparency: Rethinking State, Market & Society (IIS-UNAM/World Bank, Mexico City/Washington, DC, 2011) and Crisis, Rentismo e Intervencionismo Neoliberal en la Banca: México, 1982-1999 (Centro de Estudios Espinosa Yglesias, Mexico City, 2011). She has published over two dozen book chapters and journal articles in peer-reviewed journals, including the Administrative Law Review, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Revista Argumentos, Perfiles Latinoamericanos and Fondo de Cultura Económica. She has worked as a senior consultant to the World Bank, UNDP, Global Integrity, the Open Society Institute and the Budget Accountability Project. Sandoval's current research focuses on public sector accountability in the wake of decades of orthodox economic policies.

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Héctor Silva Ávalos

Héctor Silva Ávalos is the former Deputy Chief of Mission at the El Salvador Embassy in Washington, DC. Silva Ávalos holds a Bachelor's degree in journalism from the Universidad Centroamericana, El Salvador; a Master's in TV production, Ayuntamiento de Vitoria, Spain; and a Masters in journalism from Universidad de Barcelona and University of Columbia. He has 15 years of experience as an investigative reporter in La Prensa Gráfica, a major Salvadoran newspaper. As an expert on Salvadoran organized crime he has researched and authored journalistic pieces quoted in U.S. and Salvadoran publications on the topics of Los Perrones, one of the main DTOs in El Salvador; Mexican cartel penetration in Central America; and the influence of the Colombian FARC in drug trafficking in Central America. He currently authors two blogs on organized crime and U.S.-El Salvador-Central America relations.

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Alexander Wilde

Alexander Wilde directs the CLALS project on religion and violence in Latin America, supported by a two-year grant from the Luce Foundation. He was Vice President for Communications at the Ford Foundation and headed Ford’s regional office for the Andes and Southern Cone. He was also a senior fellow at the Helen Kellogg Institute (Notre Dame) and the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, D.C.). He formerly directed the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and has taught at Georgetown, George Washington, Notre Dame, Lawrence (Wis.), Haverford College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His scholarly research has addressed religion, human rights, democracy and historical memory in Latin America. He is the co-editor of The Progressive Church in Latin America and author of Conversaciones de caballeros: La quiebra de la democracia en Colombia. He serves on several international advisory boards and has advised various award-winning documentary films related to the themes of his research.

Degrees
Ph.D., Political Science, Columbia University
B.A., Government, Lawrence University (Wis.)

Alexander Wilde's C.V.

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Current Fellows:

John Ackerman

Leslie Elliot Armijo

Fulton Armstrong

John Dinges

Steven Dudley

Patricia Foxen

Ben Francis-Fallon

Alba M. Hesselroth

Patricia Legarreta

Javier Meléndez

Caroline Moser

Antoine Perret

Fernando Rojas

Irma Sandoval

Héctor Silva

Alexander Wilde