Thomas Anderson
Faculty Fellow
Professor Anderson is a specialist in the Literature and history of the Hispanic Caribbean. He is a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies and of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies. From the latter Anderson received a Faculty Residential Fellowship for the academic year 2001-2002, which facilitated his research for his first book, Everything in Its Place: The Life and Works of Virgilio Piñera (Bucknell, 2006). Anderson has published articles in Virgilio Piñera: La memoria del cuerpo (San Juan: Plaza Mayor, 2000) and in a number of scholarly journals including Hispanófila, Revista Interamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (San Juan), Latin American Theatre Review, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (St. Louis), among others. Professor Anderson is presently working on his second book, Carnival, Comparsas, and National Identity in Cuban Poetry, 1916-1961, for which he has received an advanced contract from the University Press of Florida.

June Miriam Bannon
Research Fellow

Rebecca Burwell
Visiting Fellow
Post-Doc Fellow–Center for the Study of Latino Religion
Rebecca Burwell is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Loyola University, Chicago. Her areas of study include gender, family, religion, and social policy. Her dissertation focuses on motherhood in Cuba, with special attention to women’s survival strategies during the Special Period. In addition, she has taught as an adjunct instructor in the sociology departments at Dominican, North Park, and Loyola Universities.

Peter Creticos
Visiting Fellow
Institute Visiting Fellow Peter Creticos is President and Executive Director of the Institute for Work and the Economy, a think tank on workforce development. His current interests are in policies and practices in employment and in community economic development, focusing on immigrant and immigrant communities. During 2005 and 2006, he was principal researcher on a yearlong project funded by The Joyce Foundation on the integration of immigrants in the workplace. In 2007, he was principal author of a report on employment challenges and solutions for foreign-educated immigrants. He also is working with partners in Mexico to establish a bi-national dialogue on education and training that begins with the assumption that the two countries share a common labor market.

Tom Florek
Research Fellow

Agustin Fuentes
Faculty Fellow
Agustín Fuentes, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, received his PhD and MA in anthropology and his BA in anthropology and zoology from the University of California, Berkeley (1994, 1991, and 1989). Fuentes’s research and teaching interests include the evolution of social organization, reproductive behavior and ecology, conflict negotiation, conservation studies and practice, and human-nonhuman primate interconnections. He is also interested in human variation from a biocultural perspective, especially regarding misapplications and misconceptions of biological evolution. Recent publications include a coedited volume, Primates Face to Face: The Conservation Implications of Human and Nonhuman Primate Interconnections (Cambridge University Press, 2002); an examination of the evolution of gibbon (ape) social systems (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology); a re-evaluation of monogamy and pair bonding in human and nonhuman primates (American Anthropologist); and articles on conflict negotiation, conservation issues, and the role of anthropology in undergraduate teaching and research.

Edwin Hernandez
Director of CSLR
Edwin I. Hernández became program director of the Center for the Study of Latino Religion at the Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame, in January 2002. He was previously a program officer for Religion Programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts. Hernández has also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs at Antillian Adventist University, Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and as a faculty member at Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan. He coauthored Citizens of Two Worlds: Religion and Politics among American Seventh-Day Adventists. He has published numerous articles and reports dealing with various aspects of Latinos and religion, specifically as they relate to Seventh-Day Adventists, in the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, the Journal of Adventist Education, and Protestantes/Protestants. Presently he is working on an article, “Gender and Cultural Differences in Encountering Society: The Example of a Rapidly Growing Protestant Church,” and coauthoring two books in progress: AVANCE: Envisioning a Future for a New Mañana and Reconstructing the Sacred Tower. He has extensive experience in the development and implementation of national surveys focused on the experience of Latino scholars in higher education. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Link Intervention Center Inc. in St. Joseph, Michigan, and the Christian Community Service Agency in Hieleah, Florida.

Rodney Hero
Faculty Fellow
Rodney E. Hero (BS, Florida State University, 1975; PhD, Purdue University, 1980) is Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy and chair (since August 2002) in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in US democracy and politics, especially as viewed through the analytical lenses of Latino and ethnic/minority politics, state/urban politics, and federalism, and has published a number of research articles on these topics. His book Latinos and the US Political System: Two-Tiered Pluralism (Temple University Press, 1992) received the American Political Science Association's 1993 Ralph J. Bunche Award (“best scholarly work in political science published in the previous year which explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism.”) Hero also authored Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 1998), which was selected for the American Political Science Association's 1999 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award (“best book published in 1998 on government, politics, or international affairs”). He has served or is serving on the editorial boards of several political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Urban Affairs Review, and Political Research Quarterly. He has also been an officer in several major political science associations, including serving as president of the Western Political Science Association 1999–2000 and president of the Urban Politics Section (of the American Political Science Association) 2002¬–03. He came to Notre Dame in 2000, having previously taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Arizona State University, and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Martha Martinez
Visiting Fellow
Martha Argelia Martinez is an assistant professor of sociology at DePaul University and a Fellow of the Institute. She obtained her PhD in sociology August 2005 at Duke University. She specializes in economic sociology, with particular emphasis on the social consequences of economic policies and programs. Before going to DePaul she worked as a research associate for the Community Learning Centers at Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM) in Monterrey, Mexico, where she evaluated the impact of internet and computer access in rural communities. She has also written about globalization, entrepreneurship, and social capital. She is currently working on a case for DePaul’s Real Estate Center exploring the changes that the internet and telecommunication technologies are bringing to the work of real estate agents.

Timothy Matovina
Faculty Fellow
Timothy Matovina is currently the director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. He has worked with Latino communities in academic and community settings for the past two decades and has published widely on Latino theology, history, and faith expressions. His recent books include Tejano Religion and Ethnicity (University of Texas Press, 1995), Beyond Borders (Orbis, 2000) and, with Gerald E. Poyo, ¡Presente! US Latino Catholics from Colonial Origins to the Present (Orbis, 2000). He has also coauthored two books with Virgilio Elizondo, San Fernando Cathedral: Soul of the City (Orbis, 1998) and Mestizo Worship: A Pastoral Approach to Liturgical Ministry (Liturgical Press, 1998).

Duane McBride
Visiting Fellow
Dr. McBride's areas of expertise are criminology and drug abuse, and he has been published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Drug Issues, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice, International Journal of Criminology and Penology, Youth and Society, Human Organization, Addictive Diseases: An International Journal, British Journal of Addiction, Chemical Dependencies: Behavioral and Biomedical Issues, and Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. McBride has also authored two books: Legal and Illicit Drug Use: Determining Drug Abuse Treatment Needs and Drug Use and the Courts. His current research is in the areas of juvenile delinquency and the AIDS virus infection of IV drug-users. He has membership in the American Sociological Association and the American Public Health Association. Currently he is co-principal investigator on a Health Services Research Center funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and chairs a grant review committee for the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Orlando Menes
Faculty Fellow
Orlando Ricardo Menes was born in Lima, Perú, to Cuban parents but has lived most of his life in the United States. He holds a BA and an MA in English from the University of Florida. In 1998 he received a PhD in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Since fall 2000 he has been an assistant professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame. His poems have appeared in several anthologies as well as literary magazines, for example, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Chelsea, Callaloo, Caribbean Writer, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. Besides his own poems Menes has published numerous translations of such Latin American poets as the Argentine Alfonsina Storni and the Cuban José Kozer. His second collection, Rumba atop the Stones, was published in 2001 by Peepal Tree Press (Leeds, England), which specializes in new Caribbean writing. He is editor of the anthology Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred, forthcoming from Bilingual Review Press.

Marisel Moreno
Faculty Fellow
Marisel Moreno, a native of Puerto Rico, received her PhD from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, in 2004. With a specialization in modern Latin American and Latino/a literatures, much of her research focuses on the links that exist between the literature of Latinos/as in the United States and that of their countries of origin. Her areas of study include Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Dominican American literature and culture in the United States, Latina women’s writing and autobiography, and Hispanic Caribbean diaspora studies. Since 1998 she has worked at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, where she has taught various courses, including upper-level Latino/a literature in the United States.

Darcia Narvaez
Faculty Fellow
Darcia Narvaez, associate professor in Notre Dame's Department of Psychology, examines individual differences in reading comprehension such as moral development, cultural background, and reading purpose. In much of her work Narvaez merges theory and research from two traditions: cognitive psychology and moral development. For example, she has integrated approaches from discourse-processing research with those of moral development and conducted several studies of moral-story comprehension in school-age children. Narvaez has formulated a new approach to character-development education that views character as a set of teachable skills that should be taught across the curriculum in standards-driven instruction. The model, called the Community Voices and Character Education, has been implemented throughout the state of Minnesota. She reported it on it at a Whitehouse conference in June.

Marc Rodriguez
Faculty Fellow
Marc Simon Rodriguez is currently assistant professor of history and concurrent assistant professor of law at the University of Notre Dame. His work is focused on the history of Latino communities in the Midwest and Great Lakes region, with particular emphasis on the Tejano or Texas-Mexican Diaspora. Tentatively titled "Migrants and Citizens," his first book seeks to document the history of Mexican American/Chicano politics as they operated between Texas and Wisconsin. Rodriguez explores the ways in which this transregional movement of people and ideas interacted across and between communities of Tejanos, Anglos, and others as a period of increased national social movement activism developed after 1950. His recent publications include Repositioning North American Migration History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship and Community (University of Rochester Press, 2004), which he edited and to which he contributed a chapter; a chapter in Mansbridge and Morris, eds., Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of Social Protest (University of Chicago Press, 2001); and "A Movement Made of 'Young Mexican Americans Seeking Change': Critical Citizenship, Migration, and the Chicano Movement in Texas and Wisconsin, 1960–1975," Western Historical Quarterly (autumn 2003).

Feliciano Tapia
Research Fellow