LACS News

LACS Welcomes New Director

LACS is proud to announce that beginning September 2007, its new director will be Professor Richard Turits (History and Center for African American and African Studies).  Professor Turits is a historian of the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly the Hispanic Caribbean and Haiti.  A graduate of Brown University, he received an M.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1997). He was an assistant professor at Princeton University from 1997 to 2003, when he joined the University of Michigan faculty as Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies.

Professor Turits's research interests focus on histories of race, slavery, violence, peasantries, and nondemocratic regimes.  His publications include Foundations of Despotism:  Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford Univ. Press, 2003), which won the John Edwin Fagg Prize of the American Historical Association and the Bolton-Johnson Prize of the Conference on Latin American History, and was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice magazine.  His publications also include 'A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed:  The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic,' Hispanic American Historical Review (Aug. 2002), winner of the James Alexander Robertson Memorial Prize of the Conference on Latin American History. 

Professor Turits's current projects include a general history of the Caribbean with Laurent Dubois to be published by the University of North Carolina Press.  He is also writing a book on the history of racial meanings in colonial Santo Domingo and the Dominican Republic in the national period within a broad comparative perspective.  His courses include Histories of the Modern Caribbean, Histories of Racial Formation in the Americas, U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the World, Transforming History: Haiti and Cuba in Comparative Perspective, History of Modern Cuba, and Dictatorship in Latin America: History, Literature, and Testimony.  

LACS Sports A New Look This Fall!

You may have noticed we look a little different this Fall, and you're right, we're sporting a new look .  We have worked in making our site more appealing to the eye, and will continue working on improving it to give you a more pleasing experience whenever you visit.  Please feel free to make suggestions, and we will try to use them in the measure that we can.