Faculty

Meet the Latin American Studies Faculty

The concentration in Latin American Studies draws upon Knox faculty expertise in several areas related to Latin America -- history, language, literature, Black studies, political science, women's studies, sociology, anthropology and art history. Their academic field is listed below, with additional information and e-mail contacts on each person's linked profile page.

Karen Kampwirth, Chair
Professor of Political Science
Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley, 1993
"Throughout my career, I have been interested in people's attempts to radically transform their societies, why those attempts sometimes succeed, and what impact participating in such movements has on the participants."

Frederick Hord
Professor of Black Studies
Ph.D., Union Graduate School, 1987
"My most immediate projects are in the areas of Black Studies theory, African American literary criticism, Black psychology traditions, and the status of Blacks in Latin America."

Jessie Dixon
Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1998

Timothy Foster
Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Campus Director, Barcelona Program
Ph.D., Columbia University, 1994
"One of my greatest satisfactions as a teacher is empowering my students to speak with reasoned authority."

Gregory Gilbert
Associate Professor of Art
Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1998
"I am currently researching the relationship between Pragmatist philosophy and the American avant-garde, specifically the Pragmatist background for the early Abstract Expressionist art of Robert Motherwell."

Konrad Hamilton
Associate Professor of History
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1998

Jerome Miner
Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures
Director, Burkhardt Language Center
Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1995
"My current research is in computer-assisted instruction, translation, and 20th-century Latin American narrative."

Robin Ragan
Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Literatures
Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2001
"Thorough analysis of medical journals, hygiene manuals, midwifery journals, advertisements for medicine, and illustrations in fashion magazines have complemented my understanding of women's writing and how their portrayals of sick women work against the overall cultural understandings of women's bodies by focusing on the social causes rather than the biological sources of women's illness."

Magali Roy-Féquière
Associate Professor of Gender and Women Studies
Ph.D., 1993, Stanford University
"My aim is to further interrogate nationalism by addressing its silences."

Catherine Denial
Assistant Professor of History
Ph.D., University of Iowa, 2005
"I am particularly interested in the ways in which contact between cultures took place in different times and places."

Fernando Gomez
Assistant Professor of Modern Languages-Spanish
On-Site Director, Barcelona Program
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara
"In the classroom, I hope to foster an appreciation of what an important role the medium of literature plays in our lives and how it provides a space in which we can imagine, hypothesize, and negotiate such enigmatic issues as these in a way other mediums cannot."

Antonio Prado
Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literature
Ph.D., University of Illinois-Urbana, 2006
"I am interested in texts that testify gender and class positions of political struggle in times of State crisis."