Johnson-Chappell conducted field research in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from 2003–2013 that resulted in his first book, Beginning to End Hunger: Food and Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond. He maintains connections to Brazil, including participating in conferences and co-authoring publications with Brazilian colleagues, and he is seeking funds to organize a study trip to Brazil for Michigan/Midwest local food policy council members in the next several years. He also has deep connections with the agroecology cluster at ECOSUR in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, and the Institute for Agroecology Research and Action Puerto Rico.
Torres-Beltran’s research explores the relationship between gender, violence, and the state in Latin America. Using survey experiments, interviews, and analysis of large sets of micro-data on crime to study gender-based violence in Mexico, her findings challenge conventional wisdom. Laws, policies, and institutions that assist victims of gender-based violence vary greatly in their institutional effectiveness and thus generate divergent outcomes for women and victims. The gendered nature of some institutions may discourage political participation, whereas other institutions bolster engagement. She has also examined the relationship between state violence and violence against women in post-conflict Peru, focusing on forced sterilization and intimate partner violence following the Fujimori presidency. A planned book project on how bureaucrats shape gender inequality in Mexico will contribute new insights to theories of institutions, victimization, and political participation in Latin America.
Nevarez Martinez’s research examines informal housing in the United States through a “looking from the South” approach, building on the significant contributions that Global South scholars have made in advancing theoretical knowledge on informality. This approach enriches the analysis of informal housing practices within the U.S. and draws connections to broader themes of housing precarity, informality, and state regulation, which are central to Latin American urban contexts. Her work seeks to understand how informal housing is produced, regulated, and legitimized, employing a transnational framework that resonates deeply with scholarship emerging from Latin America and the Caribbean. In Michigan, Dr. Nevarez Martinez has also launched research on farmworker housing, a topic closely related to Latin Americanist scholarship on migration.
Thronson’s scholarship addresses questions that arise in practice, questions that courts and practitioners currently face; some of her publications are written to serve as resources for advocates and judges. Substantively, she focuses on the intersection of domestic violence, family law, and immigration. Recent publications have focused on derivative provisions in immigration law (in which one person’s immigration status is linked to another’s by a familial relationship), which create situations of fragility and dependency that have major implications for dependents, especially immigrant women; the interaction across global family and immigration laws to influence patterns of international migration; and migrant children’s role in the U.S. labor market. With David Thronson, she is also doing research using Guatemalan family law to broaden analysis of the ways in which family and immigration laws interact to influence patterns of international migration: long before families make decisions to migrate the United States, home country family laws influence family formation through decisions on issues such as child custody, recognition of parentage, marriage and divorce, and protection from intimate violence.
Espinoza’s research and teaching focus on environmental communication, the sociology of climate change, and the climate and health nexus. Dr. Espinoza has conducted research in Peru on news media coverage of climate-sensitive diseases such as dengue and cholera in connection to the El Niño Phenomenon and extreme weather events. She has also studied how public health experts in Peru understand the connections between environmental conditions, climate change, and infectious diseases, and how they imagine adaptative strategies in the health sector. Her current research compares how different countries in the Andean Region plan adaptations to climate change in the public health sector, while navigating tensions between local demands and international organizations' development agendas. Dr. Espinoza's second research project explores how the racialized experiences of Latin American migrants in the U.S. shape their understanding of environmental problems and climate change, as well as their views on solutions.
Seira Bejarano is a development economist working in three main areas: courts, household finance, and, more recently, political economy. However, he has broad interests in applied microeconomics. Geographically his research has been concentrated in Mexico. His work has focused on several broad topical areas: credit markets and household finance, corruption and civic participation, courts and access to justice, health, and market power.
Farver’s work is centered on helping students identify, understand, and disrupt oppressive systems. In summer 2022, he co-led with Dr. Jeno Rivero and Vincent Delgado a First Semester Abroad experience in Costa Rica. The 3-week course, UGS 102: Contested Spaces: Learning to Change the World, applied this approach, situating students’ understandings specifically in a variety of communities in Costa Rica to explore school, learning, and community. Finding that this is a unique way to think about global learning experiences, Farver, Rivero, and Delgado have since collaborated to share this global learning model through conference presentations and written works, and they are finalizing a new study abroad experience in Costa Rica to expand this type of critical, interdisciplinary work to students at all levels every summer.
J
Lawrence works on evolutionary ecology, particularly on how animals avoid predation. He focuses on Poison Frogs (Dendrobatidae), found throughout Central and South America. These frogs display considerable variation in color, meant to warn predators of the toxic nature of these frogs. This variation is contrary to evolutionary expectations for how these warning colors should arise. Consequently, Dr. Lawrence's explores how variation in warning colors can evolve and persist in nature. To answer these questions, he primarily focuses on two species of poison frog: the Strawberry Poison Frog (Oophaga pumilio) and the Green and Black Poison Frog (Dendrobates auratus) found in Panama. He uses behavioral, molecular, psychological, and ecological data to better understand this unique system. J.P. also currently leads Lyman Briggs’ study abroad program on tropical ecology in Panama.
Paredes Ruvalcaba is a community-engaged scholar, whose research reflects her commitment to social justice issues within Latin America, with a particular focus on reproductive and infant health issues in Mexico. She is currently pursuing three interrelated lines of work: 1) she examines current structural justice and equity issues in infant feeding such as the harmful promotion of commercial infant formula, lack of institutional support towards breast/chest-feeding, and tensions between infant-feeding perspectives from community members and healthcare providers in Veracruz, Mexico; 2) in collaboration with the non-profit Masa Center, she is developing educational materials about Chicanx/Latinx history and politics for the community at large, with the goal of reaching people outside an academic setting; and 3) she is collaborating with the Gunna Rucaalu collective, a group of young feminist women from the Zapotec communities of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to design and implement a community-informed comprehensive sexuality education program and to examine the possible mechanisms through which it may contribute to the prevention of intimate partner violence.
Mancha Cisneros’ research examines how institutions–policies, rules, or norms–mediate interactions between humans and natural resources, affect outcomes for natural resource sustainability and equity, and incentivize human adaptation and collective response to ecological and social change. In the context of aquatic food production for human consumption, her work centers two key research directions: food and nutrition security, and the balance between environmental protection and people’s livelihoods. A recent project highlighted the global importance of the contributions of inland and marine small-scale fisheries to food security and nutrition, employment, and economic benefits, as well as considering their environmental, gender, and governance implications throughout the supply chain, to improve the sector’s visibility in policy and decision-making arenas. This work involved direct collaboration with small-scale fisheries’ experts in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, and Saint Lucia, among other countries, to develop country case studies to inform the study. She carried out subsequent engagement and capacity development processes with multi-actor groups built on this work to design/improve national accounting of small-scale fisheries data. A second line of work focuses on the institutional design of governance structures enabling sustainable fisheries management. In Mexico, she studies the interdependencies between social, economic, natural, and institutional processes affecting implementation and performance efficacy of area-based fisheries management tools and bycatch mitigation technologies, as they relate to small-scale fisheries in the Gulf of California and Pacific coast. She has also collaborated with conservation NGOs to develop socioeconomic and governance recommendations for marine reserve designs in Mexico.
Rojo’s research, teaching, and advocacy focus on Latin American immigration, health inequalities, and food justice, with an emphasis on structural violence, legal precarity, and community resilience. Her work on Latin American migration examines how U.S. immigration policies shape deportability, sanctuary, and immigrant well-being, particularly for Central American and Mexican migrants. In addition to her academic research, her background in community advocacy has informed her work on immigrant rights and state violence. Separately, she uses participatory action research (PAR) to investigate health and food inequalities, collaborating with community organizations to explore food systems, cultural foodways, and neighborhood change through a racial justice lens. She teaches courses on social theory, race, and immigration, including Latin American Immigration, U.S. Policy, and Resistance, which critically examines migration patterns, border enforcement, and immigrant rights.
Penyak’s formative years as a teacher and researcher were spent at The University of Scranton, where he was hired in 2000 as an assistant professor of history, promoted to full professor in 2012, and granted emeritus status in 2016. At Scranton, Penyak directed its Latin American Studies Program (2002-2010) and was an affiliated member of Women's & Gender Studies (2003-2016). His dissertation used Inquisition and criminal documents to examine sex crime in Mexico City from 1750-1850. He has also published on female confinement, the professionalization of obstetrics medicine, spousal abuse, male same-sex attraction, incest, and prohibited artwork in Mexico. Additional research interests include religion and haciendas, culminating in three edited works on those topics. Since 2023 he has taught one class each semester at MSU (Latin America and the World; Modern Mexico; Latin America During the National Period).
Halgunseth studies cultural and socio-cultural influences on parenting, parent-child interactions, and child development; culturally sensitive measurement development; inclusive practices in family engagement. The bulk of her research has studied Latin and Latin American parenting. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Latinx Families, emphasizing the heterogeneity of the Latine/x population in the world and the importance of not over-generalizing one Latine subgroup (e.g., Mexico) across countries in South America and Caribbean. She has conducted several studies with Puerto Rican and Dominican families and is currently collaborating with Dr. Carolyn Greene at UConn Health to conduct a study on Mexican and Puerto Rican mothers across the U.S., including Puerto Rico, which examines whether a parenting measure on emotion socialization in Spanish is appropriate for use.
Villares Orellana’s work explores the definition and representation of Nature and the landscape, viewing them as evolving concepts shaped by perception, science, and cultural narratives. Though his work is rooted in research-based methods and often involves collaborations with scientists and academics, he emphasizes the viewer’s role in constructing meaning. Many of his projects function as visual experiments, using data, mapping, and scientific simplifications of Nature to create reimagined landscapes that challenge conventional ways of seeing.
African Futures:
Fifth cohort of scholars announced
Partnerships for Innovative Research in Africa:
8 research teams awarded
AAP Bridge:
Connect and
collaborate online
Transforming Institutions Strategic Funding:
2024 grantees
