Javier Garcia-Liendo
Associate Professor of Spanish, Arts & Sciences / Romance languages and Literatures
My primary research and teaching focus is modern ethnic formations in Peru during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Capitalist modernization, mass migration, and urbanization radically altered rural societies in the Andean highland (where Quechua and Aymara people inhabited) and transformed social patterns formed in Colonial times. I am especially interested in understanding the ways in which the market economy, salaried labor, state expansion, schooling, modern medicine, and means of communication profoundly altered ethnification and racialization patterns in Latin America, taking Peru as a case study. I am currently working on a book-length project in advance contract with Pittsburgh UP on this topic. Most of my undergraduate and graduate courses also focus on the subject, and some include the study of Amazonian indigenous ethnic identities too.