People

Miguel Rosas Buendia (Ph.D. Brown University) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish. He specializes in Latin American history and literature. His research interests include history of science, environmental studies, and indigenous studies. He studies topics such as scientific knowledge production, nationalism, and extractive industries, as well as the transatlantic exchange of ideas about the Pre-Columbian material culture. 

His book manuscript, tentatively titled Crafting a Technoscientific Nation, examines the circulation of scientific, engineering, and archaeological paradigms and their role in the question of nation-building in nineteenth century Peru. This inquiry takes place through the transatlantic intellectual trajectory, governmental work, and academic writings of the Peruvian scientist Mariano de Rivero (1798-1857). The book studies Rivero’s conceptual and practical involvement in three central subjects –the Andean territory and its resources (centrally mining), the Pre-Columbian material culture and its national interpretation, and the future of the republic in the emerging industrial world. It argues that Rivero’s projects constitute a singular technoscientific view, which serves to examine with new lenses other takes on those subjects during the period.

Trained in literary studies and cultural history, Miguel has also published on poetry and travel writing, and examined the intersections between natural sciences, mining, and aesthetics in a global context. For a future project, Miguel is already collecting primary sources in South American and European archives on modern agricultural initiatives and cultural production around food and farming in the period 1850-1920.

Germán Vergara (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of History. He specializes in environmental and Latin American history. His research and teaching explore environmental change, animal history, energy regimes, and the ecological problems of capitalism(s) and industrialization in Latin America over the past two centuries and try to locate those changes in a global context. 

His book Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2021) examines how and why modern Mexico transitioned from an agrarian society powered by animal muscle, water, and wood to a fossil-fueled industrial society. It traces the ways in which industrialists, state officials, engineers, and ecology shaped this process and suggests that fossil fuels were adopted in response to the limits of wood-and-water based industrialization, the predominant manufacturing model of the late nineteenth century. The book argues that the shift to a carbon-based society has been the main agent of environmental, economic, and social change in Mexico for over a century.  Fueling Mexico is the first study to look at the historical roots of today’s global fossil-fuel energy regime from a Latin American perspective.

Germán’s second book project focuses on the region’s biodiversity crisis, one of capitalism’s most important consequences. The study -tentatively titled Becoming History: Species Extinctions and Capitalism in Latin America Since 1800– will tell the history of capitalism in the region through the lens of species extinctions and animal population loss while illuminating the role that economic change, scientific and cultural ideas, and other factors have had on species loss over time.