At the June 22, 2009, Board of Trustees meeting, three doctoral faculty members were confirmed as distinguished professors beginning September 2009: Laird Bergad (History), Graham Priest (Philosophy), and Stephen Steinberg (Sociology). Of the three, only Graham Priest is a new appointment at the Graduate Center. (See this page.)

Laird Bergad, a member of the doctoral faculty in history since 1985 and the founder and director of the GC’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies, has been appointed distinguished professor of Latin American and Puerto Rican studies at Lehman College.
An internationally respected authority on the social, economic, and demographic history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave-based plantation societies in Latin America and the Caribbean, his innovative and landmark studies have broadened the historical understanding of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. For his significant scholarly work, he has been honored with Guggenheim, Fulbright, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships.

Bergad’s research into the slave culture in Latin America and the Caribbean began in Puerto Rico. His book Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Princeton University Press, 1983) revised the analytical framework for understanding Puerto Rican history prior to the United States’ occupation and annexation of 1898. In the 1980s, Bergad was one of the first foreign scholars to be granted unrestricted access to historical archives in Cuba. From this research came two books: Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton University Press, 1990), which examines the evolution of the sugar plantation economy in nineteenth-century Cuba, and The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1995). The latter was the first empirical examination of the price and economic structures of Cuban slave society, and was co-authored by Fe Iglesias García and María del Carmen Barcia.

In the 1990s, Bergad turned his attention to Brazil’s Minas Gerais province, the country’s largest slave-holding region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The resulting work was The Demographic and Economic History of Slavery in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). He followed this with a study of the largest slave societies in the Americas, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2007). In 2010, Cambridge University Press will publish Hispanics in the United States: A Demographic, Social, and Economic History, which Bergad co-authored with Stanford professor Herbert S. Klein; this will be the first full-length, quantitative study of the U.S. Latino population in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Stephen Steinberg, distinguished professor of urban studies at Queens College and a member of the doctoral faculty since 1971, is a renowned authority on race and ethnicity in the United States. Through his skills as a social historian and theorist, Steinberg has established himself as a critical, compelling voice for social justice in the United States. He has continually challenged the prevailing conceptions about race by demonstrating how political and economic institutions engender and reproduce racial inequalities, and by exploring the role that the social sciences have played in providing intellectual legitimacy for racial hierarchies. Derrick Bell, visiting professor at New York University Law School and founder of critical race theory, says of Steinberg, “I can think of few with equal scholarship in the field of race and even fewer with his courageous willingness to take positions contrary to the orthodox.”

Steinberg is the author of seven books. His bestseller The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity and Class in America (Beacon Press, 1981) debunked the notion that ethnic groups advance or languish depending on their value systems. Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Beacon Press, 1995), which explores how the civil rights movement changed race scholarship, won the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. His most recent book, Race Relations: A Critique (Stanford University Press, 2007), shows how the logic of imperialism was embedded in the race relations paradigm when sociology was founded at the University of Chicago in 1892, and questions whether the discipline “can ever turn over a new leaf without first confronting and disowning its own sullied past.”

Photo credits: Bergad by Jason Green; Steinberg by Nancy Bareis