This Graduate Institute International History Department is pleased to welcome Ricardo Salvatore, a very distinguished economic, social and cultural historian from Argentina, as the first holder of the Pierre du Bois Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Latin American History. Mr Salvatore’s regular position is plenary professor in the History Department at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.

In an age of specialisation, Ricardo Salvatore is remarkable for the breadth of his expertise across history and related disciplines. His PhD from the University of Texas at Austin (1987) is in economics, and he is a major contributor to the economic history of Argentina and Latin America generally. In this context, he is one of the pioneers of anthropometric methods in Latin American history: the study of heights as evidence of changing nutrition and thus of physical welfare. He is also a major figure in Argentine social and political history. Here he has explored the history of crime and violence, and brought to nineteenth-century Argentina the perspective of the Subaltern Studies Group of Indian historians, but with perhaps greater emphasis upon the capacity of peasants and other subalterns to alter history. In addition, some of his very recent work examines the culturalpolitics of the emergence of Latin American studies in the United States. He is on the editorial board, or a corresponding editor, of nine journals, including both area studies (Latin American, American) and history (diplomatic as well as economic and social). Mr Salvatore’s work has been widely recognised internationally, as his long list of fellowships and visiting professorships attests – including at Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the London School of Economics.

Thanks to the support of the Pierre du Bois Foundation, Professor Salvatore will be at the Institute for the first half of the spring semester, based in the Department of International History. He will offer a course on “The Economic History of Latin America”, which will be taught over seven weeks, with two classes each week. It is open to students in a range of programmes. He will also be giving a public lecture entitled US Historians and the Colonial Question in Latin America on 26 March at 18:30 and a research seminar.

This article was written by Professor Gareth Austin and appeared in the spring 2012 issue of Globe.