Kellogg Institute Visiting Fellows- Spring 2004

Marieclaire Acosta

Acosta's research project, exploring how the human rights movement has affected the process of democratization in Mexico and other Latin American countries, goes to the heart of her own distinguished involvement in human rights activism in her native Mexico. From 2000 to 2003, she served as Under-Secretary for Human Rights and Democracy in the country's Foreign Affairs Ministry.

In her nearly 30-year career before the election of an opposition party made her government involvement possible, she founded the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, co-founded the Mexican Academy of Human Rights, and was active in Amnesty International while a professor at the National University of Mexico. She earned an advanced degree in sociology from that university and later studied human rights in Costa Rica and France.

Maria Helena Moreira Alves

Alves, one of Brazil's foremost social justice activists, is also a scholar; she served as this semester's Visiting Chair in the Study of Brazilian Culture from March 29 to April 4, when she returned to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she is Tinker Visiting Professor. She has a PhD in political science from MIT.

Alves spoke to several Notre Dame audiences about her work in Brazil's largest grassroots non-governmental organization (NGO), Viva Rio. She also spoke about her involvement in helping to found and shape the future of the national political movement, called the Worker's Party or PT, that has given Brazil its current president.

Armando J. Barrios Ross

Barrios is a Venezuelan economist who has served as a consultant for a number of international institutions, including the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank. He is pursuing a PhD in the School of Public Policy at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is based at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA) in Caracas.

Barrios, along with Peruvian researcher Carlos Meléndez, is participating with the Kellogg Institute in a three-year project to build international linkages and support collaborative research on civic, administrative and economic reforms in the Andean region. The project is supported by a $100,000 Fulbright Educational Partnerships grant. Barrios is researching "Institutional and Fiscal Dimensions in the Inter-Governmental Arrangement in Venezuela."

Kathleen Bruhn

Bruhn plans to study labor unions and other popular social movements allied with particular political parties. Do such alliances significantly and systematically constrain protest by these popular movements? Her research, "Partisanship and the Dynamics of Protest in Brazil and Mexico," could shed new light on the argument that parties with deep roots in civil society help to stabilize political systems. The answers should also foster a re-examination of the more basic argument, as she describes it, that protest is a symptom of disease and political parties are the cure.

Bruhn's latest book, published in 2001, is Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development . She has a PhD in political science from Stanford University. She teaches at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Juliette Levy

Levy wants to build upon her PhD studies in Latin American history at the University of California, Los Angeles by further exploring the economic history of Mexico's Yucatán region. Her post-doctoral project, "The Rights to Credit: Land, Wealth and Institutions in a Developing Economy, Yucatán, 1850-1900," examines how informal institutions contributed to a region's economic growth and allocation of wealth. It involves analysis of credit records to trace the size of the credit market and the numbers and types of people who obtained access to credit. Such research reflects Levy's interest in the relationship between a lack of economic growth and persistent social inequality.

Levy teaches history at James Madison University.

Jamil Mahuad

Mahuad served as President of Ecuador from August 1998 to January 2001, capping a career of nearly 20 years in Ecuadorian politics. His experiences, including the coup that ended his government, have led him to a second career of scholarship and teaching on how political leaders manage economic challenges. He has served as a Fellow at three units of Harvard University - the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government, the Institute of Politics, and the Law School.

Mahuad holds a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard, as well as a law degree from the Catholic University of Ecuador. He is serving as a Visiting Professor in Political Science and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg, where he addressed faculty and students as a guest lecturer in spring 2003. Mahuad is teaching a course in the Department of Political Science on the challenges of governing in the age of globalization.

Carlos Meléndez

Meléndez, who is based at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, plans to spend his time at Kellogg completing a case study of political representation in Peru. He has studied models of grassroots political participation among the urban poor in the neighborhoods of Lima. His research on political conditions in the Andean region also extends to political parties and clientelism. He has published an analysis of the "new political class" in Peru, as well as an "ultimate political map" analyzing Peru's 2002 regional elections.

Meléndez was trained as a sociologist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He has received scholarship support from the Latin American Council for the Social Sciences (CLACSO). He is a former visiting scholar at the Latin American Studies Center at Duke University. His visit is part of a new partnership supported by a US State Department grant.

Horacio Sobarzo

Sobarzo's book project examines the status of fiscal federalism in his native Mexico, probing whether and how Mexico should decentralize its policies for providing services and collecting appropriate tax revenue from the public. While Mexico is highly centralized, there are reasons both for change and for caution, suggests Sobarzo, who holds a PhD in economics from the University of Warwick, England.

He is currently director of the Center for Economic Studies at El Colegio de México, where he specializes in international trade, public finance, applied general equilibrium models and input-output models. He is also part of a research group that has been evaluating the economic effects upon Mexico from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

For a list of past Visiting Fellows, click here.