A Farewell Message from CLAS Director Adela Pineda
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
My role as Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the Pardee School of Global Studies will come to an end on June 30, 2021. I am heading to Texas, where I will assume the directorship of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT Austin.
I was appointed Director of the Program of Latin American Studies in 2015, only a year after the founding of the Pardee School of Global Studies. Essential to my undertaking the role was a recognition of the need to increase the visibility of Latin American Studies at Boston University, to bring together students and scholars engaged with the region, and to create a hub devoted to the study of the region’s complexities, but also as a fundamental vantage point to interpret the world at large.
As I look back at the six years of my tenure, I am extremely thankful to the Latin American Studies community at Boston University and to everyone who made our accomplishments possible.
Thanks to the vision and support of Dean Adil Najam at the Pardee School, we were able to transform the program into a Center in 2017. Since then, we have implemented significant academic initiatives, including a graduate certificate and a Visiting Scholars program. We established a fund in the name of our late colleague David Scott Palmer, who founded the Latin American Studies Program more than three decades ago, and have renamed our travel grants in his honor.
Most importantly, we were able to create a vital sense of community among faculty and students through a carefully planned program of scholarly and cultural events, which included myriad faculty-led lectures and symposia, as well as beyond-the-classroom interdisciplinary activities aimed at stimulating students’ critical thinking, creativity, and, during the past year, a sense of hope in the midst of a global pandemic.
Together, we have instituted a public program that reflects our engagements with a full range of institutional and non-institutional policy fields and social arenas. We have also featured prominent writers, musicians, and artists from across Latin American and the Caribbean, as well as a number who are living in the United States, showcasing the indisputable role of the humanities and the arts to imagine better futures in a world in flux.
With your efforts, we have pushed to bridge the gap between Latin American and Latinx studies, promoting scholarly and public programs that engage the BU community with the history and culture of the Latinx populations of the United States, as well as with political issues directly impacting Latinx communities. We gave generated closer rapport between the Center and the Hispanic community in Boston, seeking to empower BU students of Latin American descent, including DACA recipients.
At the Pardee, our center has played a major role in forging multicenter initiatives, which have enhanced the contributions of Latin American Studies to cross-regional perspectives on global challenges of concern to all of us. Most of all, we have brought forward concrete initiatives to integrate faculty and students across the university in the promotion of antiracism, diversity, and inclusion from a Latin American Studies perspective.
Directing Latin American Studies at BU has been one of my most rewarding experiences, and I thank you all for this amazing opportunity. My special thanks to Elizabeth Amrien for her vision and work as Assistant Director, and especially to our students, who are our primary audience.
Leaving BU after so many years leaves me with a complex flood of feelings. Yet, I am extremely happy to announce my successor, Professor Rady Roldán-Figueroa, who will assume the post of CLAS Director on July 1. Rady is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at the School of Theology and has a distinguished publishing record that includes The Martyrs of Japan: Publication History and Catholic Missions in the Spanish World (Spain, New Spain, and the Philippines, 1597–1700) (Brill, 2021) and the co-edited volume Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P.: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion (December 2018, Brill). With his ample knowledge in comparative religious studies and transatlantic history, I am confident that Rady will help bring Latin American Studies to the level of prominence the field deserves in our interconnected world.
Congratulations to our dear colleague Rady and farewell to all.