BROOKE LARSON

Professor (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1978)

Curriculum vitae

Email: brooke.larson@stonybrook.edu

Interests: Colonial and postcolonial Bolivian Andes; peasant movements; race, indigeneity,
and rural education.

My research and graduate teaching fields encompass five centuries of colonial and
modern history, with a regional focus on the Andes. My early research (Cochabamba,
1550-1900) provided a sweeping overview of Spanish colonialism and social
transformations in the valleys of Cochabamba, with an eye on the adaptive vitality of
Andean peasant society in the late 18 th century. That work (as well as my co-edited
book, Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration) became part of a transnational interdisciplinary
effort in the 1980s and 1990s to reshape the dynamic field of Andean Studies. A third
book, Trials of Nation Making, took a wider comparative approach to the postcolonial
problems and possibilities of nation-making in the Andean republics of Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia during the 19 th century. My forthcoming book, The Lettered
Indian, is an ethnographic history of the epic battle over indigenous education and its
implications for Bolivian nation-building projects and the contested meanings of race
and citizenship over the 20 th century. At Stony Brook, where I helped found the Latin
American Caribbean Center, I taught an array of graduate seminars and undergraduate
courses, including Colonial Latin America, Race and Nation, European/Indian
encounters, and Comparative Frontiers.

SELECT WORKS

• "Capturing Indian Bodies, Hearths, and Minds: Gendered Politics of Rural School Reform in Bolivia, 1920s–1940s"
• "Democratic Progress or Peril? Indigenous and Popular Mobilization in Bolivia"
• "Revisiting Bolivian Studies: Reflections on Theory, Scholarship, and Activism since 1980"