Margaret Kent Bass
Ilia J. Casanova-Marengo
Martha Chew-Sanchez
Evelyn Jennings
Marina Llorente
Shelley A. McConnell
Beatriz Carolina Peña 
Eve Stoddard
Steven F. White
Susan Willson  
    
    
 

Dr. Ilia Casanova-Marengo received her Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Rutgers University, New Brunswick and is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages. She teaches all levels of Spanish language and courses on Spanish American literature and culture and Latinos in the United States. Her current research project centers around Latino Literature and the exploration crossroads of memory, identity and grandmothers. She is the author of El intersticio de la colonia: ruptura y mediación en la narrativa antiesclavista cubana (2002). The courses Dr. Casanova-Marengo teaches in CLAS include: Elementary Spanish, Intermediate Spanish, Latin American Cultures, Latin American Literature and Latinos in the United States.
Dr. Martha I. Chew Sánchez received her BA from La Escuela Nacional de Maestros in Mexico City and from The University of Texas at El Paso. She was a visiting scholar in International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxemburg, Austria where she worked on her M.A. Thesis on community development. She studied her Ph.D. from The University of New Mexico in intercultural communication and carried out her pos-doctoral studies in UCLA in the Chicano Studies Research Center. Her areas of interest are cultural studies, popular culture in Latin America, border studies, and migration, transnationalism and nationalism. Some of her courses are cross-listed with Caribbean and Latin American Studies. She has published in Third Text, Journal of Family Communication, Communication Year book of the International Communication Association and the Global Media Studies Series and has the manuscript Corridos in the migrant memory in press at The University of New Mexico.  Her two main current lines of research are: (1) the Chinese-Mexican population in the Mexico/US border, and (2) the role of the State in the moral regulation and redomestication of maquiladora women in Cd. Juárez.
Dr. Evelyn Jennings is an Associate Professor and Margaret A. Vilas Chair of Latin American History at Saint Lawrence. She received her BA in Spanish Language and Literature from SUNY Oswego, her MA in Latin American history from SUNY Stony Brook, and her PhD from the University of Rochester in Modern European and Atlantic history. Her dissertation examined state enslavement in colonial Havana, Cuba between 1760 and 1840. She has published several articles and a book chapter on this subject, the latest an essay entitled “War as the ‘Forcing House of Change’: State Slavery in Late- Eighteenth-Century Cuba” in the July 2005 issue of the journal William and Mary Quarterly. At SLU Dr. Jennings is offering courses on colonial and modern Latin American history, Atlantic history, US and Cuban relations, and on slavery and freedom in the Americas. She also teaches the CLAS introduction to Latin American studies.
Dr. Marina A. Llorente, Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures, received her Ph.D and M.A in Spanish from the University of Kansas and her B.A from the University of Málaga , Spain . Her research has been in intersections between Hispanic literatures and gender focusing in contemporary Hispanic poetry analyzed under the theoretical framework of cultural studies. Ethics and contemporary poetry in Cuba , Mexico , and Spain is her current field of interest.
Shelley A. McConnell is Assistant Professor of Government at St. Lawrence University, where she teaches comparative and Latin American politics. Her research is focused on the consolidation of democracy in Nicaragua, a poor and dependent country that held a socialist revolution in 1979 and later made a transition to liberal democracy. In addition, she writes about the establishment and spread of international norms for democracy in the Western Hemisphere, including norms of election monitoring, regulation of political finance and pacific settlement of disputes.  Dr. McConnell holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, and earned her undergraduate degree in economics and political science from Wellesley College. Prior to coming to St. Lawrence she taught at Bard College, Hamilton College and Emory University. For nine years she served as Senior Associate Director of the Americas Program at The Carter Center, a non-profit organization founded by former US President Jimmy Carter to foster peace, health and democratic development. She was drawn to the St. Lawrence community by the opportunity to teach small classes in a liberal arts environment in keeping with her teaching philosophy, which emphasizes the need for individual engagement and mentorship of students to maximize their intellectual growth. She currently teaches courses on Latin American Politics, U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Latin America, and the CLAS 104 introductory course.
Beatriz Carolina Peña is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish. She received her M.A. by The City College of The City University of New York and her Ph.D. by The Graduate School of The City University of New York.  A revised version of Peña’s dissertation received an Honorable Mention in the 49th edition of the Premio Literario Casa de las Américas 2008, in the category of Ensayo de tema histórico-social, and more recently was finalist in the I Bienal de Ensayo  of the prestigious Peruvian literary award Premio Cope Internacional 2008. Presently, her main areas of study are Colonial Latin American literature, culture, and history, with a particular interest in the Andean region during the XVI and XVII centuries. Peña has published scholarly articles in academic journals and her forthcoming book Imágenes contra el olvido: el Perú colonial en las ilustraciones de fray Diego de Ocaña (Images against Oblivion: Colonial Peru in the drawings of Friar Diego de Ocaña) will be published by Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She is currently working on the critical edition of the travel narrative (1599-1607) to the New World of the Spanish Hieronymite friar Diego de Ocaña. Peña is very excited about a course on a special topic for the Spring semester 2010 with a travel component over the spring break to the cities of Lima and Cusco in Peru. The course titled is Colonial Andean Discourses: Domination and Resistance in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Peru.
Dr. Eve Stoddard is Professor of English and Chair of the Global Studies Department at St. Lawrence. She has been at St. Lawrence since 1986, having earned her A.B. at Mount Holyoke and her Ph.D. at UCLA where she specialized in the literature and philosophy of the Romantic era, writing her dissertation on Wordsworth and Kant.  The confluence of her work in literary theory and in 18th-century British attitudes toward slavery, she has moved into the field of post-colonial and cultural studies. Her current teaching interests include Irish and Caribbean literatures as well as post-colonial theory. She collaborates frequently with Grant Cornwell, former Professor and Chair of Philosophy at St. Lawrence. Together they have edited a book called Global Muilticulturalism: Comparative Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Nation and they have written a monograph called Globalizing Knowledge for the Association of American Colleges and Universities.  They team taught several courses for the Cultural Encounters program and they are writing a book on the semiotics of sugar mill ruins in the Caribbean .
Dr. Steven F. White is the co-founder of the Caribbean and Latin American Studies (CLAS) program, received his B.A. at Williams College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. In the Department of Modern Languages at St. Lawrence University, he teaches Spanish language classes and has worked with students who want to learn Brazilian Portuguese. He also offers classes in Hispanic American literature, Latin American film and literary translation. His students have published their book reviews, translations and articles in academic journals such Cadernos de Tradução (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil) Amazonian Literary Review (Smith College), Beacons (SUNY—Plattsburgh), and Translation Review (University of Texas at Dallas). Recent independent research projects with students he has mentored include Trabajando: Hispanic Workers on the North Country's Dairy Farms and El jaguar y la luna: El arte Náhuatl y el mundo natural , which appear in the online CLAS publication Inside the Area (http://www.stlawu.edu/clas/insidethearea/). He has edited and translated anthologies of poetry from Brazil, Chile, Cuba and Nicaragua. He is also the author of an ecocritical study of Pablo Antonio Cuadra’s poetry and the co-editor of Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine. His other publications can be seen at http://blogs.stlawu.edu/stevenwhite/
Dr. Susan Willson is a tropical ecologist who specializes in questions related to processes, maintenance, and conservation of biodiversity.  She has been working in Latin America for over a decade, with Amazonian Peru her major focus.  Dr. Willson studies population and community ecology of a highly specialized group of birds called the obligate army-ant following birds.  These birds must follow swarms of army ants to find food, and have led Dr. Willson to also become an army ant ecologist.  She has taken students with her to her Peruvian study site, and plans to publish two papers coauthored by student researchers Alissa Rafferty and April Costa in the coming year.  Dr. Willson has also lived and taught Tropical Ecology courses in Costa Rica, and is married to an Ecuadorian, so her links to Latin America are multi-faceted!
	Prof. Susan Willson (right) from the Biology department doing research in the Andes above Cusco, Peru with Alissa Rafferty ('09)

  
  

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