Charles R. Hale, professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin, has been appointed director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS).
Hale, whose appointment begins Sept. 1, was selected following an international search by a university-wide committee. Internationally respected in his field of political anthropology, Hale has a longstanding association with LLILAS that began in 1990 when he came to the university as a Social Science Research Council/MacArthur Fellow. He was the institute’s associate director from 1999-2003.
“We must continue to lead the way in transforming the field, building collaborative research and teaching relations with our Latin American colleagues,” Hale says of LLILAS, which is the leading Latin American studies program in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report 2009 rankings. “We need to put rigorous scholarship to the service of efforts that engage the urgent problems of this hemisphere.
“We have major hurdles ahead: to recruit and retain excellent faculty, to attract and train first-rate students, and to meet ambitious development goals, despite hard economic times,” he adds. “I am fully confident that we can meet these objectives, guided by a highly talented and experienced institute staff, enriched by a superlative faculty, and propelled forward by students who come to Latin American studies–at the institute and across campus–both to learn and to give voice to their own aspirations.”
Prior to his role as the institute’s director, Hale was president of the Latin American Studies Association (2007-08). He is author of “Más que un Indio: Racial Ambivalence and Neoliberal Multiculturalism in Guatemala” (School of American Research Press) and “Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894-1987” (Stanford University Press) and editor of “Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship” (University of California Press), among other works.
LLILAS is a multidisciplinary institute in the College of Liberal Arts. Founded in 1940, it is a language and national resource center under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. In 2000, alumni Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long of Austin pledged an endowment gift of $10 million to support the institute. It now integrates more than 30 academic departments across campus, has 127 affiliated faculty, and offers programs that lead to bachelor’s, master’s and doctor’s degrees.
