Jorge is a historian of slavery, Afro-descendants, and social differentiation processes in Mexico and the Atlantic world at large. His first book project is a longue-durée study of the emergence, transformations, and disappearance of the social categories associated with African ancestry in colonial Guadalajara. It is also an examination of issues of black invisibility and historical memory in the Mexican press of the nineteenth century. Jorge’s research has been published in Spanish and English by the University of Guadalajara, El Colegio de México, and The Americas. He has also published book reviews with them and Hispanic American Historical Review. Jorge is also an alumni of the 2020 class of the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop in Afro-Latin American Studies held at Harvard University. As a Chancellor’s Advance Postdoctoral Fellow, Jorge will further explore the place of slavery in Mexican history, as well as Afro-Mexicans’ contributions to colonial Guadalajara’s society, economy, and culture.

My research focuses on the activism and intellectual work of indigenous communities in Guatemala and their view of human rights. By analyzing the relationships between indigenous communities, peasants, and the Catholic Church in Guatemala. I trace the historical and social conditions of the human rights movement in Guatemala. I use the term “Rural Church” to refer to the community of Catholics from the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche focused on enhancing the living conditions of poor and marginalized communities that in the 1950s worked on organizing cooperatives, colonizing new lands, studying the structures of inequality, as well as teaching the gospel. The local histories and perspectives of indigenous and peasant communities in Guatemala provide new insights about how non-Western societies have articulated their notions of dignity and rights and contributed to the human rights movement in Latin America.

Research Interests: Latin American history, human rights, indigenous epistemologies and activism, Central America, Testimonio, women’s activism

Office Hours: Fall: Tuesday/Thursday 11-12pm

Field of Interest:
Historical Writing

Research Abstract:
Erik Kongshaug has published short stories in the Santa Monica Review and elsewhere; essays on Jamaica Kincaid, Upton Sinclair and the Muckrakers for Scribner’s and Oxford reference books; as well as one novel, The Path, exploring bicentennial US society from a child’s perspective.

At present he is writing a historical novel centered on the year 1956, exploring character relationships embroiled in the connection between European modernism and black, Jim Crow cultural experience during the “Beat” moment of American identity formation. At the same time, he is writing (and still researching) a larger work of literary non-fiction about the history and culture of the blues harmonica entitled, Voice Box for a Sorrow Song’s Soul: The blues harmonica’s inconsonant story, from the Age of Enlightenment to the Digital Age.

Office Hours: M/W/F 9:30-10am
Meetings at Phoenix Cafe

Field of Interest:
History of Religion

Office Hours: Tuesday 1-3pm

Field of Interest:
Japan: Meiji to Present; Asia-Pacific War; Japanese film & popular culture

Publications:
"Marriage, the Newspaper Business, and the Nation State: Ideology in the Late Meiji Serialized Katei Shosetsu," Journal of Japanese Studies, 24:2 (Summer 1998)

Book Reviews:
Fighting for MacArthur: The Navy and Marine Corps’ Desperate Defense of the Philippines, The Historian, 75:1 (Spring 2013)
The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38, The Historian, 71:3 (Fall 2009)
From Mahan to Pearl Harbor.  Monumenta Nipponica, 62:4 (Winter 2008)