Faculty

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Susan Aberth

Associate Professor of Latin American Art History with a particular focus on Surrealism.  Additional specialties are in African and Islamic Art.  The English edition of her book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art was published by Lund Humphries of London in 2004 and the Spanish edition by Turner, Madrid the same year.  Currently she is working on the lesbian imagery of the Czech Surrealist Toyen, for which she received a Bard Research Grant during 2007-2009.  She has served as Treasurer for the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association for 8 years. Her other scholarly interests are the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the Occult.

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Nicole Caso

A.B., Harvard University; M.A., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. Areas of specialty: Hispanic languages and literature, Latin American literature. Author of Practicing Memory in Central American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2010). Work published in scholarly journals such as Revista Iberoamericana and Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos; contributions to critical compilations analyzing various novelists such as Manlio Argueta and Rosa Marí­a Britton. Research interests include: 19th and 20th century narrative of Latin America; Central American literature; subaltern studies; memory and literature; the cultural production of collective identities; the limits of representation through writing; literature and Human Rights; ethics and representation; theories of space and place. Teaching interests include: Spanish for Heritage Speakers; Latin American testimonio; the city in Latin American fiction; literature of Human Rights in Latin America; historical fiction; crafting Mayan identities.

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Gregory Duff Morton

Program Affiliations: Latin American & Iberian Studies

Gregory Duff Morton is an economic anthropologist. He studies the movements of money through Northeastern Brazil. He engages with the urban-to-rural migrations of agricultural laborers, the wanderings of itinerant merchants, and the payouts that come from the world’s largest national cash welfare program. He is working on a manuscript entitled Leaving Labor: Reverse Migration, Welfare Cash, and the Specter of the Commodity in Northeastern Brazil.

His current project begins by traveling alongside workers who quit urban jobs and return to homes in rural Brazil. In this migration, a key resource turns out to be the government money disbursed through Bolsa Família, a giant conditional cash transfer. His research tracks the money in order to uncover the durable forms of value that it funds. These value forms have implications for social policy, since they change the gendering of household ownership and ultimately re-channel the flow of resources from one generation to the next.

He also sustains an interest in linguistic anthropology methods, examining meeting-speech inside Brazil’s social movements. In this research, he explores the meeting’s most mundane gestures – hand-raising, talking out of turn, the use of the word “I” – in an effort to understand how these gestures enact and create the foundational principles of representation.

Selected writing
 
Morton, Gregory Duff. “Neoliberal eclipse: Donald Trump, corporate monopolism, and the changing face of work.” Dialectical Anthropology, pre-publication (2017).
 
Morton, Gregory Duff. “Managing transience: Bolsa Família and its subjects in an MST landless settlement.” Journal of Peasant Studies, 42 (6): 1283-1305 (2015).
         
Republished as a chapter in Tarlau, Rebecca and Anthony Pahnke, eds. Brazilian Agrarian Social Movements. Abingdon: Routledge (2016).
 
Morton, Gregory Duff. “Modern meetings: Participation, democracy, and language ideology in Brazil’s MST landless movement.” American Ethnologist, 41(4): 728-42 (2014).
 
Morton, Gregory Duff. “Protest before the protests: The unheard politics of a welfare panic in Brazil.” Anthropological Quarterly, 87(3): 925-933 (2014).
 
Morton, Gregory Duff. “Acesso à permanência: Diferenças econômicas e práticas de gênero em domicílios que recebem Bolsa Família no sertão baiano.” (“Accessing permanence: Economic difference and gender practice among households that receive Bolsa Família in the backlands of Bahia, Brazil.”) Política e Trabalho, 38: 43-67 (2013).
 
 

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Melanie Nicholson

B.A., Arizona State University; M.A., M.F.A., University of Arizona; Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin. Translations and poems in American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America, Mundus Artium, Puerto del Sol, and Translation Review. Scholarly publications: Surrealism in Latin American Literature: Searching for Breton’s Ghost (2013); Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry (2002); articles and reviews in Latin American Writers, Latin American Literary Review, Letras Femeninas, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature, and Social Text. Prof. Nicholson is currently working on a book-length study of the bestiary in Latin American literature. Teaching interests include: surrealism, Latin American poetry, twentieth-century Latin American narrative, literature of the Conquest, translation studies, and Latino immigration.

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Miles Rodríguez

Ph.D., Harvard University, 2010; Postdoctoral Fellow in Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 2010-12. Miles is Assistant Professor of LAIS and Historical Studies, at Bard since 2012-13. Miles’s research specialties are: the Mexican Revolution and modern Mexico; revolutionary movements in modern Latin America; class-based movements among working and country people in international and global perspective. His current research and book project reinterprets the Mexican Revolution by exploring the ways in which working people and popular classes fared during and after the Revolution, as they formed agrarian leagues, worker unions, and their own independent revolutionary movements. At Bard, Miles teaches Colonial Latin American since Conquest, Modern Latin America since Independence, Latin American Revolutions, Mexican & Mexican-American Histories & Cultures, and the Anthropology & History of Brazil & Mexico.