Democracy Across the Americas Series | Drs. Bustamante, Kloppe-Santamaría, & Casarões

The Jackson Chair presents Dr. Michael Bustamante, Dr. Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, and Dr. Guilherme Casarões, who will provide a speaker series titled Democracy Across the Americas.

The lecture panel will be held on October 3, 2024, in Paul L. Foster Campus for Business and Innovation, 1621 S 3rd St, Waco, TX 76706, in Foster 240.

For the second Hispanic Heritage Month event, in response to the rising challenges to democracy across the Americas, we are launching a “Democracy Across the Americas” speaker series that brings together scholars, policy makers, and non-profit and religious leaders to discuss this issue from different disciplinary perspectives. This series seeks to explore ways we can build a more inclusive, representative, and multiracial democracy in Texas while considering current challenges to democracy across the nation and throughout the hemisphere. For our inaugural event, we invited three distinguished scholars whose work focuses on politics and culture in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil. Among other topics, this panel examines the impact of political violence and ideological and religious extremism on these countries’ democratic institutions.

Michael J. Bustamante (PhD, Yale University) is Associate Professor of History and the Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2021. With Jennifer Lambe (Brown University), he is co-editor of The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959-1980, published by Duke University Press in 2019.

At UM, Dr. Bustamante serves as Director of Academic Programs at the Cuban Heritage Collection, the largest archival repository dedicated to Cuban materials outside of the island and the largest collection of materials on the Cuban diaspora in the world. In that capacity, he oversees fellowship and grant competitions, conferences, and other academic initiatives designed to activate the collection for scholarship and public conversations in the field of Cuban Studies. He simultaneously directs the undergraduate program in Cuban Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences and its affiliated academic minor.

Dr. Bustamante's scholarship on topics such as Cuban exile youth politics and Cuban cultural policy has appeared in Journal of American Ethnic History, Latino Studies, Cuban Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Anthurium, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. His writing on contemporary Cuban affairs has been featured in Foreign Affairs, NACLA Report on the Americas, Slate, Financial Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications. In 2019, he joined the editorial board of the journal Cuban Studies, and in 2024 he became co-editor.

Prior to pursuing academic work, Bustamante served as Research Associate for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. He is a frequently sought-after commentator on contemporary Cuban affairs, Cuban-American politics, and U.S.-Cuban relations for U.S. and international media, policymakers, and public audiences.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Miami, he served as Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Florida International University. He teaches courses on Cuban, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx histories

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is a sociologist and historian specializing on questions of violence, gender, religion, and politics in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico, Central America, and US-Latin American relations. Kloppe-Santamaría is the author of the book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (published by University of California Press in 2020; translated to Spanish and published in Mexico in 2023). She holds a PhD in Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research and a Masters in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics.  Her work has received several accolades, including a Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Union (2021-2022), a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award (2020-2021), and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Distinguished Scholar Award (2020). She has published in some of the top academic journals in her field, including The Americas, the Latin American Research Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, and the Journal of Social History. She is currently a Lecturer of Sociology at the University College Cork and an Associate Research Professor at the George Washington University. She is also a Global Fellow of the Wilson Center and a Member of the Editorial Board of Foreign Affairs Lationamérica.

Guilherme Casarões is an Assistant Professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas's São Paulo School of Business. His research interests are Brazilian Foreign Policy, Populism and the Global Far-Right, Latin American Politics, and Brazil-Middle East relations. Casarões holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Universidade de São Paulo, where he also completed his Master's degree. Casarões also holds an M.A. in International Relations from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, a post-graduate diploma in History and Political Cultures from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and a B.A. in International Relations from Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais. 2021).

Among his recent publications are: "Statecraft under God: Radical Right Populism meets Christian Nationalism in Bolsonaro’s Brazil" (Millennium, 2023); "Radical Right Populism and the Politics of Cruelty: The Case of COVID-19 in Brazil Under President Bolsonaro" (Global Studies Quarterly, 2022); "Myths of Multipolarity: The Sources of Brazil's Foreign Policy Overstretch" (Foreign Policy Analysis, 2022); "Brazilian foreign policy under Jair Bolsonaro: far-right populism and the rejection of the liberal international order" (Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2021); and "The hydroxychloroquine alliance: how far-right leaders and alt-science preachers came together to promote a miracle drug" (Revista de Administração Pública, 2021).

Casarões was a Visiting Professor at Brown University (2023-2024), a Visiting Associate at the University of Michigan's Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (2019-2020) and a fellow in Israel Studies at Brandeis University (2015). He is one of the coordinators of the Far-Right Observatory in Brazil and is a research fellow at the Washington Brazil Office (WBO) and the Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI).