Center for the Americas

Director Charlie Kenney, associate professor, Department of Political Science

The Center for the Americas, directed by Associate Professor of Political Science Charles Kenney, continues to build an engaged Latin American Studies community within and beyond the OU campus. In fall 2019 the center sponsored events on ethnomusicology, on migrants at the U.S. southern border, and on the politics of anticorruption in Brazil, Peru and Latin America. Additionally, the center co-sponsored with World Literature Today a panel on the literature of the NSK Prize laureate, Cuban American writer Margarita Engle.

In the spring of 2020, the center held events on the investigation and policy consequences of the Chilean dictatorship’s 1976 assassination of a dissident in Washington, D.C., and about the causes, consequences and implications of the popular revolt that began in Chile in late 2019.

By fall 2020 the center adjusted to the pandemic by holding all activities via Zoom and conducting pandemic-related events. The first event analyzed the varied responses to COVID in the Americas, with special emphasis on Brazil, Cuba and Mexico. The CFA co-sponsored a panel comparing coronavirus inequalities in the United States and Brazil. The next event examined distrust of the state, its sources, and its effects on public health in Brazil and in Chile. The final fall 2020 event looked at the significance of the U.S. election for Latin America.

Making the most of the shift to a remote operating environment, the CFA was able to have more speakers from outside the state and from abroad participate than in typical years, and they used the opportunity to bring together speakers from the OU community with speakers from abroad and from other universities in the United States.

For example, the CFA had two on-campus scholars discuss COVID responses in Cuba and Brazil, along with one scholar from Puebla to discuss responses in Mexico. For the event on distrust of the state, both scholars presented from their home countries, Brazil and Chile.

In spring 2021, the CFA held a panel discussion on democracy and elections in Bolivia, with one participant from campus, another from Bolivia and a Bolivian scholar from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. The Center for the Americas community joined as participants in the spring 2021 symposium sponsored by the CIS Brazil Studies Center. Spring 2021 programming concluded with a Guatemalan scholar speaking from his home campus about issues of race, massacre and historical memory in Guatemala — the center's contribution to OU’s tri-campus centennial commemoration of the Tulsa Race Massacre — and with an author’s presentation of a new book on the travels and translations of Brazilian artists and intellectuals in the United States since 1870.