Brooke Larson



I received my doctoral degree in 1978 from Columbia University, where I wrote a dissertation on the social transformation of native Andean peoples under Spanish rule in a region of highland Bolivia. I also began my teaching career at Columbia, by teaching a two-semester course in Columbia College’s Contemporary Civilization (”great books”) program. Since then, I have taught at Williams College, Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and SUNY-Stony Brook. In between, I had the privilege of serving as the senior Staff Associate for the Latin American and Caribbean Program of the Social Science Research Council (1981-83). There, I worked with other scholars and staff to develop a wide variety of interdisciplinary research projects on Latin America. I joined Stony Brook’s History Department in 1984 and later served as Director of Stony Brook’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies program. In the meantime, I have served on the editorial boards of the Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, Colonial Latin American Research Review (as a co-founding member of the journal), and The American Historical Review, as well as on various CLAH program committees, the 1998 LASA program committee, and the Executive Board and President of the New England Council on Latin America (NECLAS). I am currently serving as the History Department's Director of Graduate Studies.
Research 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.

I am currently researching 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.

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.

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.)

E-Mail
brooke.larson@stonybrook.edu
Office
SBS S-333
Phone
631-632-7489
Fax
631-632-7367