BROOKE LARSON

Professor (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1978)

Curriculum vitae

Email: brooke.larson@stonybrook.edu

Interests: Colonial and post-colonial Latin America, Bolivia, peasants, race, ethnicity

My research and graduate teaching fields encompass Latin America's colonial and modern periods, with a regional focus on the Andes. My early research provided a sweeping view of Spanish colonialism and social transformations in the valleys of Cochabamba, with an eye on the adaptive vitality of local Andean peasant society as agrarian class relations evolved and Spanish political rule grew harsher. This work, as well as a co-edited book on ethnicity, markets, and migration, was part of a larger scholarly initiative bridging history, anthropology, and ethnohistory that helped shape the emerging field of Andean Studies in the 1980s. My later scholarship pivoted on the comparative history of postcolonial nation-making in the greater Andean region, as well as the rise of contemporary indigenous movements. Currently, I am working on a historical study of the epic battles over peasant schools, interethnic values and practices of education, and the contested "right to learn" over the course of twentieth-century century Bolivia. At Stony Brook, where I helped found the Latin American Caribbean Center, I currently teach topical courses spanning colonialism, race and ethnicity, early European/Indian encounters, and comparative frontiers.

SELECT WORKS

• "Capturing Indian Bodies, Hearths, and Minds: Gendered Politics of Rural School Reform in Bolivia, 1920s–1940s"
• "Democratic Progress or Peril? Indigenous and Popular Mobilization in Bolivia"
• "Indigeneity Unpacked: Politics, Civil Society, and Social Movements in the Andes"