Tinker Visiting Professor
The University of Texas at Austin is one of five major universities (with Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, and Wisconsin) to have a professorship endowed by the Edward Larocque Tinker Foundation. The goal of the Tinker Visiting Professor program has been to bring pre-eminent thinkers from Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula to the United States as a means of encouraging contact and collaboration among scholars. A Tinker Visiting Professor is expected to provide an opportunity for U.S. scholars, students and the general public to discover the contributions made by Latin American and Iberian scholars in a broad range of disciplines and, therefore, must be a citizen of an Ibero-American country, Canada, Spain or Portugal. Canadian candidates must be Latin Americanists.
A Tinker Visiting Professor is a scholar or professional (journalist, architect, judge, etc.) who has gained prominence and recognition for contributions to his/her field and not just a promising newcomer.
The Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) administers the Tinker Professor Program. Nominations for this professorship must come from chairs of UT Austin departments.
For more information, contact Carla Lañas at 512.232.2409.
Fall 2011
Juan Darío Restrepo
Juan Darío Restrepo holds a PhD from the Marine Science Program at the University of South Carolina. In his work since then, he has continued to carry out research on the environmental oceanography of deltas, estuaries, and coastal lagoons waters, especially on the factors controlling water discharge, sediment load, and dissolved load to the ocean from the Pacific and Caribbean rivers of Colombia. His research focuses on improving the understanding of the natural and anthropogenic causes affecting denudation rates and sediment transport to the Caribbean Sea from the largest fluvial system of Colombia, the Magdalena River. Dr. Restrepo has been head of the Magdalena River Science Initiative in Colombia and is currently a full Professor of Geological Sciences at EAFIT University, Colombia. He has been involved as a resource scientist for the sub-programs of LOICZ-IGBP Basins, SAmBas (South American Basins), and CariBas (Caribbean Basins), and also as a member of the Scientific Steering Committees of LOICZ-IGBP and Colciencias (Colombia) in the Marine Science Program. Dr. Restropo is a coauthor of the Coastal Communities and Systems and Caribbean Assessment chapters of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) and a visiting professor of the European Union in the master's program Water and Coastal Management. He is also a visiting scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder (2009–2011), and a consultant of the International Water Project (United Nations University and Global Environmental Fund, GEF). During his visit to UT, he will teach the class Environmental Data Analysis: Applications in Latin America.
Spring 2011
Jacinto Rodríguez
Jacinto Rodríguez received his MA in Spanish American literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2000. A practicing journalist who has gained a national reputation for his writing on Mexican politics and the press, he currently works as coordinator of the program Prensa y Democracia at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where he lectures on journalist rights, the press and politics in Mexico, and the role of Mexican intelligence in Mexico’s dirty war of the 1960s and 1970s. He has written for such newspapers and magazines as El Universal, Emeequis, Milenio, and Proceso and is the author most recently of the books La otra guerra secreta: Los archivos prohibidos de la prensa y el poder and Las nóminas secretas de gobernación: Una investigación sobre los aparatos de inteligencia en los años de guerra sucia en México. During spring 2011, he will teach the graduate seminar Secret Relationships: The Press and Political Power in Mexico.
Fall 2009
Francisco Thoumi
Francisco Thoumi received a PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota and an BA from the Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia. After working for several decades on international trade, Latin American integration, and economic development and industrialization, he began focusing his research on drugs to better understand what was taking place in the Andean countries. He uses a multidisciplinary approach as a basis for policy analysis. Dr. Thoumi’s main research has been on the competitive advantage of coca- and poppy-growing countries. He has worked on the issue of drugs in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. During 1999–2000, he was a Research Coordinator for the UN Program Against Money Laundering and also coordinated publication of the World Drug Report, 2000. His outstanding research has been funded by the UN Research Institute for Social Development, UNDP, and the Open Society Institute. During his fall 2009 visit, Dr. Thoumi taught the course Political Economy and Social Problems of Illegal Drugs in the Andes (and Other Countries): A Multidisciplinary Approach.
Spring 2009
Rafael Rojas
Dr. Rojas, a specialist in Cuban intellectual history, holds a PhD in history from El Colegio de México as well as degrees from the Universidad de La Habana and UNAM in Mexico. He has published thirteen single-author books, among them Cuban Intellectual History, Cuba mexicana: Historia de una anexión, and La política de adiós, as well as numerous articles and book chapters covering the nineteenth century to the present. Dr. Rojas is a professor at the Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. During 2007, he was a visiting professor at both Princeton and Columbia University.
