Visiting Scholars

Professor Celia Cussen teaches colonial Latin American history at the University of Chile in Santiago. She is the author of Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Martín de Porres (Cambridge, 2014) and the editor of Huellas de Africa en América: Perspectivas para Chile (Universitaria, 2009). Her research interests include colonial religion and the economic, cultural and social dimensions of slavery in Latin America.

He holds degrees in Anthropology from Stanford University (MA) and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD), and is a tenured professor at the Institute of Anthropological Research of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His current research focuses on the history of tourism and the construction of the exotic in the Mayan region. He is also working on a book about socio-racial formation in Guatemala. CLAS Visiting Scholar 2013-2015. CLAS Tinker Visiting Professor spring 2014-2015.

Juan Carlos Rulfo was born in Mexico City in 1964. He is a Mexican screenwriter and director son of author Juan Rulfo. He has written, produced, and photographed several films. He graduated B.A. in Communication Sciences from the Metropolitan Autonomous Universty, and film direction at the Centro de Capacitación Cinemtográfica, both in Mexico City. His thesis was a short film entitled ‘Granfather Cheno and Other Stories’ (1995) and was nominated for the Honorary Award for Foreign Film, at the Academy of Film, Arts and Sciences from Hollywood. ‘Juan, I Forgot I Don’t Remember’ (1999), was his first feature-length film, and has received national and international recognition and awards.  Since 2001, he is a member of the National System of Creators of the National Endowment for the Arts (FONCA). In 2003 Rulfo received a Guggenheim grant to keep working on memories and language topics. A result of this was his second film, En el hoyo ‘In the Pit’ (2004/06), received national and international recognitions and awards, like the Sundance International Documentary Jury Prize. Since then, he still working on film documentary campus with films like Those who remain, Depanzazo and Carrière, 250 meters.

Film or images in motion have given him the opportunity to dream with his ancestors and to imagine things that may have or have not existed. Film is a fabric of time and space, and memory is the perfect evocative thread for this medium. We can imagine a story out of time and in another space where what matters is not so much the verisimilitude of what is told, but rather the telling of it.