Mara Loveman
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
Department of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
8112-B Sewell Social Sciences
Email: mloveman@ssc.wisc.edu
Mara Loveman (Ph.D. UCLA, 2001)
joined the UW Madison faculty in 2003. She is a
political and historical sociologist with broad interests in race and
ethnicity, nationalism, social movements, and the state in comparative
perspective. She is also interested in the social history of demography as a
field of science, especially the history of production and analysis of racial
statistics. Her research has appeared in leading journals, including a study of
the conditions for collective resistance to state repression during military
dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay (“High Risk Collective
Action”, American Journal of
Sociology 1998); an explanation for a state-building failure in 19th-century
Brazil (“Blinded Like a State”, Comparative
Studies in Society and History 2007) and a solution to the historical
puzzle presented by the dramatic “whitening” of Puerto Rico’s
population in the first decades of the twentieth century (“How Puerto
Rico Became White”, American Sociological Review 2007).
Currently, Mara is working on a
book about the practice and politics of racial classification in Latin American
censuses from the colonial period to the present day. She is also involved in
three distinct collaborative projects that aim to tackle some of the challenges
of measuring, modeling, and interpreting racial and ethnic population data in
quantitative social scientific research. The first of these is a collaboration
with Stanley Bailey (UC Irvine) and Jeronimo Muniz
(UFMG) that investigates how methods of collecting and coding race data in
Brazilian social surveys affect the picture and the politics of racial
inequality in contemporary Brazil.
The second, in collaboration with Sarah Bruch (UW Madison, doctoral candidate),
seeks to develop an innovative analytical approach to measuring and modeling
‘race’ in research on racial disparities in educational outcomes in
the contemporary United States. The third, in collaboration with Rick Nordheim (UW Madison, Dept of Statistics) develops an
improved approach to linking cross-sectional demographic surveys for purposes
of historical longitudinal research. One product of this project will be a new
longitudinal sample of Puerto Rico’s
early twentieth century population created by linking the 1910 and 1920 Puerto
Rican PUMS.
Mara teaches undergraduate courses
on comparative racial inequality, race and ethnicity in Latin
America, and contemporary Brazilian society. She has taught
graduate courses on nationalism, critical issues in contemporary sociology of
race, and training seminars in race and ethnicity and in the sociology of
economic change and development. She has twice been awarded a “Favorite
Instructor Award” by undergraduate residential communities, and in 2008,
she received an “Exceptional Service Award” from the College of
Letters & Science in recognition for her contributions to teaching
first-year undergraduates. In 2010 she was awarded the Sociology Department
award for Excellence in Teaching.
Publications
Published and forthcoming papers not
accessible through links below may be requested by writing to mloveman@ssc.wisc.edu
Loveman, Mara, Jeronimo O. Muniz, and Stanley Bailey. “Brazil in Black and White? Race Categories, the Census, and the Study of Inequality” Forthcoming in Ethnic and Racial Studies
Loveman, Mara. “Census-Taking and Nation-Making in Nineteenth-Century Latin America” forthcoming in Miguel Centeno and Agustín Ferraro (eds) Paper Leviathans: State Building in Latin America and Spain 1810-1930s
Loveman, Mara. “Whiteness
in Latin America: Measurement and Meaning in National Censuses” Journal de la Société
des Américanistes, 95 [2] (2009): 207-234
Loveman, Mara. “The
Race to Progress: Census-Taking and Nation-Making in Brazil (1870-1920)”
Hispanic American Historical Review
89 [3] (2009): 207-234.
Loveman, Mara. "The
U.S. Census and the Contested Rules of Racial Classification in Early
Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico" Caribbean
Studies 35 [2] (2007): 79-114.
Loveman, Mara and Jeronimo O.
Muniz. “How
Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Inter-Census Racial
Reclassification” American Sociological Review 72[6]:
915-939, December 2007.
[Online methodological supplement
to Loveman and Muniz (2007) is accessible on the American Sociological Review website: http://www2.asanet.org/journals/asr/2007/loveman07.pdf]
Loveman, Mara. “Blinded
like a State: The Revolt Against Civil Registration in 19th
Century Brazil” Comparative Studies in Society and History
49(1): 5-39, January 2007.
Loveman, Mara, Jeronimo O. Muniz and
Ana Cristina Collares. “Brazil – Sociology”
Handbook of Latin American Studies. V.63. United States
Library of Congress. 2007.
Loveman, Mara. “The
Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power” American
Journal of Sociology 110 [6] (2005): 1651-83.
Brubaker,
Rogers, Mara Loveman and Peter Stamatov.
“Ethnicity
as Cognition” Theory and Society 33 [1] (2004): 31-64.
Reprinted
in Ethnicity Without Groups. Rogers
Brubaker, (Ed.), Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004.
Loveman, Mara. “Is
'Race' Essential? A comment on Bonilla-Silva” American
Sociological Review 64 [6] (1999).
Loveman, Mara. “Making
‘Race’ and Nation in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil:
Taking Making Seriously” Theory and Society 28[6] (1999).
Loveman, Mara. “High
Risk Collective Action: Defending Human Rights in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina”
American Journal of Sociology 104[2] (1998): 477-525.
Reprinted
in Mexico,
Central, and South America: New Perspectives:
Social Movements (v.3). (Pp. 1-50). Jorge I. Dominguez (Ed.), New York: Routledge, 2001.
Reprinted
in Social Movements in a Global Context: Canadian Perspectives. Rod Bantjes (Ed.). Canadian Scholars’ Press. 2007
Tables
referenced in “High Risk Collective Action” as available from
author upon request are now available here: Human
Rights Organizations under military dictatorships in Chile, Uruguay and
Argentina
Book Reviews
Review
of Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor
Rodríguez (eds).
When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror.
Austin: University of Texas
Press. 2005. In American Journal of Sociology. 112 [3] (2006).
Review
of Livio Sansone, Blackness
without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. In
American Journal of Sociology 110: 854-855 (2004).
Review
of Jonathan W. Warren, Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence
in Brazil. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2001. In Contemporary
Sociology 31[5]: 591-592 (2002).
Review of R.D.
Grillo, Pluralism and the Politics of Difference:
State, Culture, and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1998. In Nations
and Nationalism 5[4]: 577-604 (1999).
Teaching
Soc 620 -
Comparative Racial Inequality
Inter
L&S 106 – Race and Ethnicity in the Americas (First-year undergraduate seminar:
http://www.lssaa.wisc.edu/figs/)
Inter
L&S 110 – Contemporary Brazilian Society (First-year undergraduate
seminar)
Soc 913 - Nationalism
Soc
922 – Researching Race: Current Questions and Controversies
Soc
993 – Training Seminar in the Sociology of Economic Change and
Development
Soc
987 – Training Seminar in Race & Ethnicity