Steve Jefferey Stern

Alberto Flores Galindo and Hilldale Professor of History; former Vice-Provost for Faculty and Staff.  Leading historian of Latin America. Researched Spanish colonial rule in Peru, family structures of lower class Mexican families from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and the memories that the Pinochet regime left in Chile in the twentieth century. Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of the Spanish Conquest (1993) assesses how both Inca society and Spanish society adapted or failed to adapt to each other. The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (1997) assesses family structures and the role of women in late Colonial Mexican society and presents a differentiated view of the role of women in the family that goes against stereotypes describing lower-class families as purely patriarchal. Remembering Pinochet's Chile (2004) assesses through interviews how Chileans remembered Pinochet and his era. This book was the first volume of a trilogy whose other volumes, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973-1988 (2006) and Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989-2006 (2010), integrated textual, visual, audio, audio-visual, and oral documents to create a comprehensive historical study of the human experience of dictatorship and constrained democracy in a Latin American society of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and the ways such experiences built both a culture of divided memory and a new human rights consciousness. Among his major awards are research fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Program, and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has also received awards for published work, among them the 2007 Bolton-Johnson Prize, a best-book award, and the 1982 James A. Robertson Prize, a best-article award, both from the Conference on Latin American History (the society of professional historians of Latin America, in affiliation with American Historical Association).