Ph.D. student in History, Jian Ren, published "Beyond Revolutions: Mao-Era China’s Market Entry Strategies in Latin America" in Business History.

The article asks how the People’s Republic of China develop commercial relations with the Global South during its Maoist years  It explores the question through China’s market entry strategies in Latin America. Latin America posed significant challenges for Mao-era China in establishing robust relations.

Ph.D. student Clio Isaacson has received the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships for her project: Women of the Nahuatl Annals: Writing the Lives of Women in Late Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Mexico, advised by Prof. Townsend.  Clio and one other student in the history Ph.D. program was selected from a pool of over 500 applicants.. 22 Fellows were chosen.

For the announcement click here.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Lawrence, Professor of English, for writing and publishing the new book: "El Americano". 

Jeffrey is the author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (2018) and the translator of Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America (2016) and Sergio Chejfec’s Forgotten Manuscript (2023). His first novel, El americano, was published by Chatos Inhumanos press in 2024.

El Americano Description: 

What do we do with Americans who are constructed in our language? Where do we put those who adopt a cultural tradition that in principle does not suit them? What do we do with Americans who are constructed in our language? Where do we put those who adopt a cultural tradition that in principle does not suit them? would it belong, being its inherited culture the one that, for centuries, has exercised domination over the acquired one? This gringo, this Yankee, this American becomes an uncomfortable subject, who speaks a Spanish that is delocalized, untranslatable and changing depending on the circumstances. El Americano is Jeffrey Lawrence's sharp criticism and broad reflection on the complexities and disruptions that cultural subjects like Hemingway and himself pose in the Latin American literary field. In this autofictional novel, the love for literature, the desire to learn and the candor trigger an entire vital journey through the Hispanic world that ends up becoming the basis of the identity of a writer-Frankenstein: built of cultural fragments, difficult to categorize , threatening, but also immensely tender and fascinating.

This is a novel in which the North and the South look at each other's faces and smile anxiously. Halfway between Roberto Bolaño and Ben Lerner, The American installs an intruder in the heart of Latin America and from there begins to question everything. Carlos Fonseca. 

More Information: Here

Congratulations to Jian Ren, PhD candidate in History at Rutgers who has been awarded the Susman Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2024-2025, generously provided by the Warren and Beatrice Susman Endowment. 

Thanks to the generosity of the late Warren and Beatrice Susman, the Department of History will award two fellowships to support history graduate students during their final year in the History Ph.D. program. Jian has been named one of those two awardees after finishing a competitive application process.

This award will allow Jian to finish writing and revising his dissertation "Dancing at the Periphery: Knowledge and Experiments in China-Latin America Relations and the Global Cold War, 1949-1989" full-time. His dissertation investigates how diplomats, politicians, intellectuals, trade negotiators from China and Latin America, and Chinese immigrants in Latin America developed trust and mutual understanding between 1949 and 1989.

Before coming to Rutgers, Ren received his B.A. in Political Economy and Spanish from the University of Sydney and his M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Chicago.

Congratulations to Jian!