Notes From the Editors

Abstract

Notes From the Editors Gregory S. Crider and Jürgen Buchenau The Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies convened March 4–8, 2020 for our Sixty-Seventh Annual Meeting in Austin, TX, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered in-person academic gatherings. With the support from the Center for U.S.-Latin American Initiatives and the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, the Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs (CLASP), the conference featured sixty-eight panels on a wide variety of topics. Program chairs Timothy Henderson (University of Auburn-Montgomery) and María Zalduondo (Bluefield College) completed the yeoman task of putting panels together in the areas of Literature & Humanities and History & Social Sciences, respectively. Monica Rankin (University of Texas at Dallas), Jürgen Buchenau (University of North Carolina Charlotte), Steven Hyland (Wingate University) and Gregory Crider (Winthrop University) organized local arrangements. The conference also included two professional development workshops for junior faculty and graduate students, respectively, organized by Vanessa Castañeda, one of the authors in this volume. We are now beginning our third year of collaboration with the University of North Carolina Press. We enjoy the broader readership afforded by our inclusion in Project MUSE, an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and books. We also highlight our ongoing collaboration with the SECOLAS podcast, Historias, which frequently includes interviews with TLA authors and other Latin Americanists from diverse disciplines. As always, the editors welcome new ideas and suggestions. This volume features some of the best papers from the conference in article format. Eighteen of the 252 presenters at the conference submitted revised papers of their papers for publication. Following editorial and peer review and another round of revisions, the six articles published in this issue represent a range of disciplines in both the humanities and social sciences. In presenting these articles, we appreciate the help by our graduate assistant, Julia Poppell, and the Managing Editor of The Latin Americanist, Leah Walton. UNC Charlotte, Winthrop University, and Wingate University, the three SECOLAS host institutions, offer significant financial and institutional support for the publication and success of this journal. In particular, we offer our gratitude to Dr. Nancy Gutierrez, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC Charlotte; to Dr. Takita Sumter, Dean of the [End Page 7] College of Arts and Sciences, and the Ellison Capers Palmer, Jr. Professorship of History at Winthrop; and to Dr. Jeff Frederick, Provost at Wingate University, for their continuing encouragement of both The Latin Americanist and SECOLAS. [End Page 8] Copyright © 2021 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies