Building and Protecting Inter-American Scholarly Community: Fifty Years of Fruitful Investment
In the 1960s and ’70s, authoritarian regimes seized power across Latin America. Faced with repression, some of Latin America’s leading scholars fled their home countries, often assisted by international foundations and governments. Others established new research centers in their own countries and built transnational networks of academic collaboration.
Central to the creation of inter-American networks of solidarity and collaboration was Kalman Silvert, one of the founding architects of Latin American studies in the United States. Prominent intellectuals—Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Chilean economists Osvaldo Sunkel and Alejandro Foxley, Peruvian sociologist Julio Cotler, Argentine political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell, and others—played key roles in fostering inter-American scholarly collaboration. They were supported by a number of U.S. institutions, especially the Ford Foundation, and by such leading scholars as Albert O. Hirschman and Bryce Wood.
How did these efforts come together some 50 years ago? What have been their fruits? How can the legacy of those years inform current challenges facing Latin American, inter-American, and other scholarly communities?
Speakers
Abraham F. Lowenthal*
Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California
Louis W. Goodman
Professor and Dean Emeritus, School of International Service, American University
Martin Weinstein*
Professor Emeritus of Political Science, William Paterson University of New Jersey
*Lowenthal and Weinstein are co-editors of Kalman Silvert: Engaging Latin America, Building Democracy (Lynne Rienner, 2016).
Commentator
Jeremy Adelman (via videoconference)
Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Princeton University
Moderator
Cynthia Arnson
Director, Latin American Program, Woodrow Wilson Center