Second CLAIS graduate & professional student conference
On Saturday, April 21, the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies held its second Graduate & Professional Student Conference. The conference was coordinated by Reinaldo Funes Monzote, a visiting professor in the Department of History, and Hannah Greenwald, a second-year PhD student in the Department of History. Over the course of three panels, students from Yale’s various graduate and professional schools came together to share research and give feedback on each other’s projects.
Student presenters hailed from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of the Environment, the Divinity School, the School of Architecture, and the School of Management. In the first panel, five students spoke on “Dynamics of Colonialism and Post-Colonialism.” The panel featured students from various academic disciplines and also fostered historical conversation across imperial divides, with students speaking about Colombian heritage management, Guadeloupean literature, Jamaican maroon communities, slavery and commodity production in Trinidad, and cash and finance in the early Atlantic world.
The second panel on the day, “Gender, Environment, and Religion,” featured a wide variety of topics as well. Students explored 19th-century immigration to Haiti; present-day religious movements in the Dominican Republic and Brazil; and community forest management in southern Mexico.
In the afternoon, four students spoke on the final panel of the day: “Politics, Economy, and Sustainability.” The topics discussed in this panel included small and medium enterprises in Colombia; voter turnout and party politics in Chile; architectural design with an eye to water management in Mexico City; and U.S. Latino perspectives on the threat of global climate change.
The CLAIS Graduate and Professional Student Conference connected students from various disciplines working on Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian world.
Written by Hannah Greenwald, PhD Student, CLAIS Graduate Affiliate