From 1962-1964, an alluniversity committee advocated for the creation of a separate academic program for the growing Latin American Studies resources within the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Committee Members included: • • • • • • • •
Paul Doughty (Anthropology) Frank Hachmura (Economics) Juan Orrego-Salas (Music) Phyllis Peterson (Government) Robert Quirk (History) Stefan Robock (Business) James Scobie (History) Merle Simmons (Span/Port)
The Latin American Studies Program (LASP) formed in 1963 with Robert E. Quirk as the Director. What motivated the program’s formation? “The world in the 1960’s is a brutal place to live – and perhaps to die. We [currently] offer the students in the Latin American Area, not realism, but a candy-cotton view of the world’s problems, as though Fidel Castro, the Argentine and Peruvian militarists, and the political leaders of Brazil were in some fanciful fairyland.” - Memo from Robert E. Quirk to Frank T. Gucker, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, sent Oct 16, 1962
In 1964, Quirk hired Emma Simonson to serve as IU’s first Latin American Librarian with the help of then IU Foundation Chair Herman B. Wells.
A few of Simonson’s accomplishments during her tenure as librarian include:
• Frequent trips to Latin America to develop institutional relationships with Latin American archives, libraries, publishers and universities to purchase new acquisitions.
• She notably received two grants to travel to the Soviet Union and to Poland , East Germany, and Czechoslovakia in the 1970s to research their collections on Latin America. • Served as President of the Seminar for Latin American Library Materials (SALAM) from 1974-5, chairing its 1975 meeting in Bogotá, Colombia.
• Invited SALAM’s 21st Conference in 1976 to Indiana University and facilitated its logistics.
In Fall 1964, the Latin American Studies Program established a PhD Program.
It was discontinued in December of 1965 because a PhD in Latin American Studies, “could not be defended academically� according to its Faculty Council.
Robert E. Quirk resigned as Director of the LASP in 1965 to become the managing editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR). IU housed HAHR from 1965-1970.
James R. Scobie, a Professor in the History Department, was hired in 1965 by Quirk and Wells explicitly to take over the directorship of LASP He served as director from 1965- 1967.
During his tenure, Scobie secured a second $800,000 Ford Foundation Grant. With the money…
“We added faculty. We’d already been adding people – Political Science, Spanish department, Economics, throughout the university – history, several new appointments. Graduate students had grants. And then this snowball because you get that, then the students get…there was NDFLs, the federal government, the federal government set up programs for foreign areas. And so, as I said, it was a halcyon time.” – R.E. Quirk
In Spring 1965, the Latin American Studies Program moved from Ballantine Hall to Lindley Hall 311.
Image from 1968 Brochure
Paul L. Doughty, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, took over CLACS’ directorship from 1968-1971
“In 1968, I became director of the Latin American Studies Program in Bloomington. That was a real break, and very exciting. We had gotten a big, five million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation for developing Latin American Studies….
We had this big speaker budget, so we had all kinds of people coming to give talks. I got to meet a lot of people. I got involved in Latin Americanist politics, so to speak, at the time through Jim Scobie’s urging. Jim dragged me along, and began educating me about how these things work. I got involved with founding the Latin American Association as the Indiana University representative to what was then just the organizing group of LASA.” -
Doughty, Paul L. Interview by Floredliz Tina Bugarin. 17 March 1995 (emphasis added)
John Lombardi CLACS Director 1971-1973
Professor of History Associate Director – W.E.B. Du Buois Library University of Massachusetts Amherst
“Area studies centers are focal points for regional and cultural clusters of expertise that have no other home in the university, and as such, serve a critical function. Because they are not disciplinary departments but interdisciplinary collaborations, they manage a wide and varied resource base that they can call on whenever the faculty, students, administrators, or citizens have an interest, concern, or project related to the region. The range of expertise in these area studies centers ranges from true subject and area specialists to other disciplinary experts with an occasional but often critical interest in the region.” - Personal Interview, February 18th 2014
After 12 years of service as the Latin American Librarian and Bibliographer, Emma Simonson retired at the end of the 1975-76 Academic Year. She was replaced by Glenn F. Read Jr.
During the 1979-1980 Academic Year, the College of Arts and Sciences considered cutting the Latin American Studies Program because of “the program’s lack of diversity in class offerings, primarily due to its shortage of political scientists, economists, and sociologists with specialties in Latin America.”
Anya Peterson Royce CLACS Director 1979-1983 Chancellors’ Professor Anthropology
“CLACS and other area centers play a vital role, offering both undergraduates and graduate students a curriculum focused on an area and its global positioning that transcends disciplinary boundaries…[They] can bring faculty and students together around common challenges and opportunities, each contributing to the conversation from their own discipline. Area programs also provide language training and opportunities for field and archival research. They open the doors to national and international networks. They are inherently interdisciplinary and local/global in scope. By crossing institutional boundaries and addressing contemporary issues, they enrich the intellectual life of the academy and contribute to a public conversation about global challenges and opportunities” - Personal Interview, 16 March 2014
Jack Hopkins CLACS Director 1983-1985 Professor School of Public and Environmental Affairs
Jack was a specialist in Latin America and public development administration. Among his many travel assignments and research projects in Latin America were extended assignments in Peru and Argentina. He was the editor of Latin America and Caribbean Contemporary Record, in several semi-annual volumes, and author of Eradicating Smallpox: Organizational Learning and Innovation in International Health and of Policy-Making for Conservation in Latin America. – R. Agranoff (2003) “Memorial Resolution Professor Emeritus Jack Hopkins”
In 1984, the Latin American Studies Program was officially renamed as the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
• Additionally, Director Hopkins oversaw the move of CLACS offices from Lindley Hall to 313 N. Jordan Avenue.
• The building was razed in 1998 to construct the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center and the Lee Norvelle Theater and Drama Center.
Dennis Conway CLACS Director 1985-1988 Professor Emeritus Geography During Conway’s tenure as director, CLACS trained 200 IU graduate students to act as interpreters and local guides for athletes for the 10th Annual Pan-American Games in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1987.
Russell O. Salmon CLACS Director 1988-1994
“Professor Salmon’s cross‐disciplinary and transnational research and teaching interests centered foremost on the Southern Cone and Central America, and undoubtedly were inspired by the Mexican writer Andrés Iduarte, his former Columbia professor. Chile was Salmon’s initial and life‐long research focus, and he published articles on Alberto Blest Gana, Jotabeche, Joaquín Edwards Bello, and Pablo Neruda, as well as the Argentine Domingo Sarmiento. Throughout his career, Salmon was interested in the socio‐political themes of the novel and poetry, and his early writings examined the roto (poor Chilean urban class), the pueblo, and the caudillo. Later on, he turned his attention to Nicaragua and the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal.” - Sadlier, D. (2009) “Memorial Resolution Associate Professor Russell O Salmon”
“There was recently a big article about how academics only speak to each other. And one of the things that strikes me is that we need area studies specialists, when you have high-level academics without knowledge of what goes on in the ground....There is a lot of ground level investment when you go to Latin America and have to understand how to interact with people and develop networks. But without that knowledge, you can create some really messed up policies. But I think that there is an important place for people who understand geographic areas in interdisciplinary ways. If you want to understand the economics, you have to understand the culture. You can’t do these things in archives” – Personal Interview, February 19th 2014
Silvia Arrom CLACS Acting Director 1989 Professor Emeritus History Department Brandeis University
From 1989 to 1991, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies entered what Librarian Glenn F. Reed called “a library materials budget crisis�, halting new acquisitions, unsubscribing from one-third of the journals and economizing monograph purchases.
Jeffrey Gould CLACS Director 1995-2007
Rudy Professor History Department
“For all the power and novelty of globalization, ultimately key events in the world take place in the nation-state or are within the imaginings of ethno-nationalism. These phenomenon beg for an area studies type understanding.” – Personal Interview, February 28th 2014
Accomplishments:
• Founded the Minority Languages and Cultures Program in 2002, offering classes in… • Nahuatl Pilpil • Inga Quechua • Haitian Creole • Yucatec Maya • In 2006, CLACS received its solo Title VI grant and founded the Brazilian Studies Program
In 1998, CLACS moved to 1125 East Atwater
After 22 years as Librarian, Glenn F. Read retired in 1998.
He was replaced by Julie Nilson (left), who worked as the Librarian for Latin American Studies from 1999-2002.
Luis Gonzรกlez (right), current Librarian for Latin American Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, ChicanoRiqueno Studies, Latino Studies started working at Indiana University in 2003.
Bradley Levinson CLACS Director 2008-2011 Professor School of Education
Levinson replaced Professor Robert Arnove on the Steering Committee. Arnove ‘passed the torch’ to him in order to maintain the strong connection between CLACS and the School of Education.
Highlights from his tenure as Director include: • Successful Title VI Re-application with the addition of the Sustainable Development Initiative • Capital Improvements to 1125 East Atwater • Creation of Academic Secretary Position • Restructuring L501 to introduce MA and PhD Minors to Latin American Studies Resources at IU
“With the year 2013 Indiana University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. Latin American Studies began at IU in 1963 as a small program. CLACS now acts as a stand alone Title VI National Resource Center, boasts of more than a hundred affiliated faculty from IU, IUNW and IUPUI, and administers multiple degree programs, ranging from an undergraduate minor to a Masters and a PhD minor. This dramatic growth of Latin American and Caribbean Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry can be witnessed in disciplines as diverse as History and Education, American Studies and SPEA, Spanish/Portuguese and Anthropology. In a fundamental sense, the fifty-year history of CLACS at IU represents a microcosm of Latin American studies writ large.”
L. Shane Greene CLACS Director 2011-Present Associate Professor Anthropology
Academic Secretaries
Associate Directors • • • • •
Diana Pritchard Eduardo Brondizio Andrea Siquiera Matthew Van Hoose Melissa Britton
Administrative Secretaries • • • • • •
Lisa Scott Katherine Hopkins Judy Lucas Carol Glaze Ricardo Valdez Michael Dauro
• • •
William (Bill) Tilghman Sarah Bosk Katie Novak
Thank you to our past and present CLACS Associate Directors and Administrative Teams! Interim Directors • • • •
Peter Guardino John McDowell Richard C. Burke Dennis Conway