Stefano Tijerina obtained his Ph.D. in History at the University of Maine in 2011, and is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Maine’s Maine Business School. He has been the inaugural recipient of both the Maine Historical Society’s P.D. Merrill Research Fellowship (2023) and the Canadian Business History Association's Chris Kobrak Research Fellowship (2018), as well as a North Star Collective Faculty Fellow (2024) and a Provostial Fellow at the University of Maine. He has published on the modern history of Canadian and American business expansion into Latin America. His work has appeared in the Journal of Canadian Studies, American Review of Canadian Studies, Iperstoria, Ensayos Sobre Política Económica, Desafios, and Perspectivas Colombo Canadienses. He has also contributed chapters in several edited volumes including; Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression, Trade-Offs: The History of Canada-U.S. Trade Negotiations, "A Samaritan State" Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid, 1950-2016, Mercados en Común: Estudios sobre Conexiones Transnacionales, Negocios y Diplomacia en las América, and Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in Petroleum. He is the author of Opportunism and Goodwill: Canadian Business Expansion in Colombia, 1867-1979. (2022).
Joyce Bennett is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bates College whose research and teaching focus on how marginalized people navigate the global neoliberal economy at the nexus of language revitalization, feminism, social justice, and political economy. She mostly focuses on the Kaqchikel Maya-speaking population of the Western highlands of Guatemala, but she also collaborates with ethnolinguistic groups throughout Guatemala and with Indigenous and other marginalized peoples in North America. Connecting learning and scholarship to the people and places academics study through mutual collaboration and respect is fundamental for her, which is where her interest in public-facing work was born. Her current research focuses on Maya women in Guatemala and their attempts to protect their traditional weavings through intellectual property rights. She is the recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Scholars award in 2022-2023 and an Engaged Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, also in 2022-2023, which supports that work. Her scholarly work includes her first book, Good Maya Women: Migration, Clothing, and Language Revitalization in Highland Guatemala (University of Alabama Press, 2022), and articles in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, International Journal of Women’s Studies, Maya America, and more. Last year, she took a training seminar on writing op-eds and has since published three in Newsweek, The Houston Chronicle, and The Dallas Morning News. She just moved to Maine in August, is looking forward to connecting with others here, and is very grateful for the space to expand her skills in creating public scholarship.