Brooke Larson

Professor

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1978

Research and Teaching Interests:

My research interests in Latin America revolve around the historic struggles of Andean indigenous peoples for land, community, identity, and rights under Spanish colonial rule and the postcolonial republics. More recently, I have concentrated on the resurgence of modern ethnic movements under the modernizing Bolivian state in the early 20th century.

As a teacher, my interests are broad and interdisciplinary. They range from topics on colonialism and comparative frontiers to the problems of race and nation making in the 19th and 20th centuries (see sample syllabi).

Syllabi:

Race, Empire, and Nation in Latin American History.
Framing Latin America: Politics, Culture and History in Film.
Comparative Frontiers in Latin America
Colonial Latin America: Themes and Literature (Graduate Field Seminar)
Race and Nation Building in the Americas (Graduate Theme Seminar)

Current Research:

A book-length manuscript, tentatively entitled: Aymara Indians and the Lettered City. Struggles over power, knowledge, and identity in the Bolivian Andes. This book probes the ideological battles, cultural politics, and grassroots social practices of rural Indian school reform and popular literacy in the Andean countryside. On a larger plane, it uses the case of Aymara cultural struggles to raise larger postcolonial dilemmas of pluriethnic nation making in the context of stark racial, ethnic, and class inequality.

Major Publications:

Trials of Nation Making. Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

(An earlier, Spanish-language version the above book was published as, Indígenas, élites, y estado en la formación de las repúblicas andinas, 1850-1910. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Andinos/Universidad Católica del Perú, 2002.)

Cochabamba, 1550-1900. Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. , xxvii + 422 pp. (Expanded edition of my 1988 book, with a new prologue, final chapter, and forward by Wlliam Roseberry.)

Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 428 pp. (Co-edited with Olivia Harris and Enrique Tandeter.)

Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba 1550-1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 375 pp. (Winner of NECLAS Best Book Award, 1990.)

Contact Information:

Address:

Department of History
Social and Behavioral Sciences Building
State University of New York
Stony Brook, NY 11794-4348

Office:	SBS S-333
E-mail:	blarson@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Phone:	(631) 632-7489
Fax:	(631) 632-7367