18 Williams Hall
achallu@bgsu.edu
419 • 372 • 2769

Dr. Amilcar Challu, Assistant Professor (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2007).

I teach undergraduate classes on Latin American and World History both at the undergraduate and the graduate level. Undergraduate students have survived my courses on The Modern World, Latin America Before Independence, Latin America After Independence, Modern Mexico, Environmental History of Latin America, and Famine in the Modern World. At the graduate level I teach the historiography seminar on Latin America (to be offered in Fall 2010) and Quantitative Methods. Check my blog if you are interested in my teaching offerings and the thought behind the planning.

My research deals with living standards and colonial policies of food supply in Mexico. My major project is a book manuscript entitled “Hunger, Markets and Empire: Hunger, Markets and Empire: Living Standards and Food Supply Policies in Late Colonial Mexico.” It is about how Mexico became a country with more inequality and less food security in the decades preceding independence. I argue that the rural population was the most affected in their access to food by policies that increased the reliance on grain markets (instead of, say, the traditional reliance on subsistence agriculture). These policies, which became more notorius in the 1770s and specially after the 1780s, favored those had more resources to gain the upper hand in the market —the affluent, and more broadly the cities and the mines. The project is based on my dissertation entitled “Grain Markets, Food Supply Policies, and Living Standards in late Colonial Mexico” (Department of History, Harvard University, 2007) which won the Gerschenkron Prize for best Economic History Dissertation outside the US and Canada in the year 2007-2008, and was finalist to the World Economic History Congress award on pre-1800 dissertations.

Connected with my research on grain markets, I also work on living standards in eighteenth and nineteenth century Mexico. Unveiling new data on economic and biological welfare, I have published an article reassessing the role of agricultural crises in Historia Agraria, No. 47 (January 2009) and Legajos No. 2 (October 2009). This research is part of a broader interest in the economic history field to reconstruct the history of human welfare and inequality in Latin America. A result of this approach is "Living Standards in Latin American History," a book coedited by Ricardo Salvatore, John Coatsworth and me, which is slated for publication in Spring 2010 by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies–Harvard University Press.

Beyond my involvement in the Department of History, I am an active participant of the Institute of Culture and Societies’ Cluster on Latin American and Latino Studies (2008-9) at BGSU, and coordinated its activities in 2008-9. I have given public talks in Northwest Ohio and Mexico on my research interests and recent Latin American politics.