Connecticut College history chair awarded prestigious international grant
Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department Leo J. Garofalo has added to Conn’s recent streak of prestigious grants awarded to faculty to support important research.
An expert in the history of Peru and the Andes, as well as the African diaspora in Iberia and Latin America, Garofalo will receive six months of research funds from the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Germany. His research project examines the key roles that Africans and their descendants played in the social fabric of Spanish colonial rule in the Cuzco region of the Andes in the 1500s and 1600s. The grant includes support for three months of research abroad in a variety of archives located throughout Peru, including in Lima, Abancay and Cuzco.
“I am honored to receive support for this work and grateful for the chance to contribute to Andean Studies in ways that will benefit our students at the College and those in Peru seeking to understand better and more fully their own past and present communities,” Garofalo said.
Garofalo explained that this period of history of the black experience in southern Andean cities and the agricultural and mining region is poorly understood and little known, and that his aim is to produce a nuanced and far more detailed portrait of this population during that chapter of history.
Several universities in Peru had already asked Garofalo to present some preliminary findings during the summer, but this new funding will enhance the project dramatically.
“This grant will permit me to make further contributions and to collaborate with Peruvian universities that hosted me in the past as an undergraduate exchange student and later as a visiting Fulbright professor,” Garofalo said. “These schools also regularly provide excellent study away opportunities for Conn students, and these exchanges between Peru and the College are key to what global education means at Conn, and they help make this such a special place to teach and learn.”
