Gilbert M. Joseph, professor of history and chairman of the Council on Latin American Studies at Yale University, has been appointed as a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for the 1996-97 academic year. Mr. Joseph’s research project is titled, “Forging and Contesting the Mexican Nation, 1821-1996.”
Fellows are chosen each year in a rigorous international competition. This year, over 800 applicants from 95 countries vied for 34 residential fellowships. According to Moira Egan, director of external affairs for The Woodrow Wilson Center, “scholars of the highest caliber” were chosen. They “embody a variety of disciplines, professions, topics, nationalities, and viewpoints.”
Professor Joseph received his doctorate from Yale University in Latin American history in 1978. In 1993, after teaching for 15 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he returned to Yale to join the faculty. He is author of “Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States, 1880-1924”; “Rediscovering the Past at Mexico’s Periphery”; and, with Allen Wells, “Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Insurgency in Yucatan, 1876-1915.” The author of numerous articles on modern Mexico, the Mexican revolution, and the history of rural crime and protest, he is also editor or co-editor of several scholarly books and journals.
Among Mr. Joseph’s honors are the Sturgis Leavitt Prize — awarded to him twice for the best article on a Latin American subject—; induction into the Academia Yucatanense de Ciencias y Artes; and the Tanner Award for excellence in teaching at UNC. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Recently, Professor Joseph was named director of the new Mellon Fellowship Program in Latin American History, funded by a multi-year grant to enhance the doctoral training of Latin Americanists at Yale. He also serves on the Advisory Councils of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and the Chicano Cultural Center at Yale.
The Woodrow Wilson Center is a presidential memorial created by Congress in 1968 to foster scholarship and dialogue in the humanities and social sciences. The Center brings fellows from around the world to Washington, D.C., encourages discourse among the academic disciplines and policy professions, and publishes the results of these activities through the Wilson Center Press, “The Wilson Quarterly,” and “Dialogue.”