Alejandro Velasco is a historian of modern Latin America whose research and teaching interests are in the areas of social movements, urban culture and democratization. His manuscript, “‘A Weapon as Powerful as the Vote’: Urban Protest and Electoral Politics in Modern Venezuela,” couples archival and ethnographic research to examine how residents of Venezuela’s largest public housing community pursued full citizenship during the heyday of Latin America’s once-model democracy. Before joining the Gallatin faculty, Professor Velasco taught at Hampshire College, where he was a Five College Fellow, and at Duke University. His teaching record includes interdisciplinary courses on contemporary Latin America (including seminars on human rights, cultural studies and urban social movements), historical methods courses on 20th-century revolutions, graduate history courses on urban political history and workshops with primary and secondary school educators. At Gallatin, his courses include “(Re)Imagining Latin America,” “¡Revolución!” and “Incivility in the Age of Civil Society.” Professor Velasco’s research has won major funding support from the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, among others, and he has presented widely at both national and international conferences and symposia. His most recent publications are “‘A Weapon as Powerful as the Vote’: Urban Protest and Electoral Politics in Venezuela, 1978-8193” (Hispanic American Historical Review, November 2010) and “‘We Are Still Rebels’: The Challenge of Popular History in Bolivarian Venezuela” (Dan Hellinger and David Smilde, eds., Participation, Politics, and Culture in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy, Duke 2011).
