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.
Tinker Professors
Fall 2009
Francisco Thoumi
Francisco Thoumi received a Ph.D. in economics from the University
of Minnesota and an B.A. 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.
Dr. Thoumi will be the Tinker Visiting Professor in fall 2009 and will
teach 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 Ph.D. 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.
Fall 2008
Carolina Santamaria
Dr. Santamaria holds a Ph.D. in
ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s in
music from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. She has been
the recipient of a Summer Fellowship from the Smithsonian Center for
Folklife and Cultural Heritage, a Fulbright-Javeriana Scholarship for
graduate studies, and the Rosa Sabater special award in harpsichord
performance. Her research explores the history of a prominent national
music in Colombia, the "bambuco," and the academic and popular
discourses that surrounded its "sacralization" as the pre-eminent
Colombian music in the 1930s and 1940s. Dr. Santamaria also explores
the division between the disciplines of historical musicology and
ethnomusicology and suggests modes of integrating the two areas in a
Latin American context.
Spring 2008
Sandra Kuntz Ficker
Sandra Kuntz Ficker is Professor of
Economic History at El Colegio de México, where she earned her Ph.D.
She has been a Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Chicago
and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of California, San
Diego. Her research work deals with various economic history topics,
including the economic impact of railroads, the entrepreneurial history
of railroad companies, and Mexico's foreign trade and commercial
policy—all in nineteenth and early twentieth century Mexico. During the
spring semester, Dr. Kuntz Ficker will be teaching the course Economic
History of Mexico, 1800–1940.
Fall 2007
Ariel Dulitzky
Ariel Dulitzky holds a law degree from
the University of Buenos Aires School of Law and an LL.M. from Harvard.
A former professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and American
University, Washington College of Law, Professor Dulitzky is a leading
expert in the Inter-American human rights system. His work on the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was fundamental to the
creation of the Special Rapporteurship on Afro-Descendants and Racial
Discrimination. Prior to joining the IACHR, Dulitzky served as the
Latin America Program Director at the International Human Rights Law
Group, where he developed a program on racial discrimination in Brazil
and oversaw the Law Group's Program on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua.
Professor Dulitzky will be teaching the course Human Rights in Latin
America during the Fall 2007 session.
