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Mellon Fellows, 2010-2012

The Center for the Americas Andrew W. Postdoctoral Fellows for 2010-2012 are:

Amelia M. Kiddle, a specialist in the political and cultural history of Mexico, is currently completing an analysis of Mexico's relations with its Latin American neighbors, cultural diplomacy, and the culture of diplomacy. This book expands the project introduced in her doctoral dissertation, "La Política del Buen Amigo: Mexican Relations with Latin America during the Presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934-1940" (University of Arizona, 2010), which won the Premio Genaro Estrada for the best doctoral thesis on the topic of Mexican foreign relations from the Government of Mexico.   She is a contributor to, and co-editor of, Populism in Twentieth Century Mexico: The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría (University of Arizona Press, 2010), and she recently published an article in the Journal of Latin American Studies entitled “Cabaretistas and Indias Bonitas: Gender and Representations of Mexico in the Americas during the Cárdenas Era,” which tells the story of a female dance troupe that performed in Panama in 1940. Her teaching interests include colonial and modern Latin American history, Mexican history, and world history. Her webpage can be found at http://akiddle.faculty.wesleyan.edu.

 
Christian M. Gonzales is a historian of colonial America and the early United States. He specializes in Native American and Euro-American relations, American empire, and Native American slave systems. His research interests lie in the intersections of Native American cultural histories and American continental expansion. On one hand, he is interested in how Natives negotiated and exploited the growth of American empire through cultural change and the creation of new indigenous identities. On the other hand, he focuses on how Protestant evangelism and eighteenth century rights discourse laid ideological foundations for the expansion of the United States.  Gonzales is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Architects of Empire: the antiremoval movement and the transformation of indigeneity in the making of American imperialism, 1783-1859." This work, which expands on his doctoral dissertation (University of California, San Diego, 2010), examines the collaboration of missionaries, evangelicals, Quakers, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Seneca which developed in opposition to Indian removal.  Gonzales has contributed book reviews to the Journal of San Diego History.  His work has also appeared in David Goldfield, ed. Encyclopedia of American Urban History. Gonzales' teaching interests focus on Early American history, early United States history, and Native American history. He currently teaches American Studies and Native American Studies courses through the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University. His webpage can be found at http://cmgonzales.faculty.wesleyan.edu.