2025 Co-Directors
Mario Rufer
Professor of History and Postcolonial Theory, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Xochimilco
Professor Mario Rufer is a historian from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, Master's and Ph.D. in Asian and African Studies and holds a Specialization in History and Anthropology from El Colegio de México. He is currently a Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) Xochimilco Campus, where he teaches Theory of Cultural Processes and Postcolonial Theory. His lines of research are oriented towards cultural studies and postcolonial criticism, studies of subalternity, and the social uses of the past and temporality: nation and public history, archives, museums, community memory, and heritage. He has also written about new methodologies and transdisciplinary criticism.
Araceli Masterson-Algar
Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas, Kansas
Araceli Masterson-Algar’s research addresses human mobility, urban cultural studies, and social movements with a focus on the grounded experiences of migrant communities in U.S., Ecuador, and Spain. She is also a scholar of critical engaged pedagogies, and works on projects bridging theory and praxis through place-based research, and critical reflection on the contradictions that often suffice from our roles as researchers, educators, and employees in institutions of higher education.
Founders
Elliott Young
Professor of History, Lewis and Clark College, Portland
Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. Professor Young is the author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII, and Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, as well as co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, the Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC) and the Migration and Asylum Lab (MAL) at Stanford University. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 700 asylum cases.
Pamela Voekel
Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Professor Pamela Voekel has won awards for her scholarship, her undergraduate and graduate teaching, and her efforts in collaboration with underserved students targeted by anti-migrant policies. Her second book, For God and Liberty: Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1780-1861 (Oxford University Press, 2022) draws on more than forty archives in six languages and ten countries to demonstrate that a religious conflict underlay the Liberal-Conservative political battles of Latin America's nineteenth century. She is the co-founder and five-time conference director of the Tepoztlán Institute, and a co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, now in its second decade of providing rigorous college-level courses for the undocumented students banned from Georgia's top research universities.