Alejandro Velasco

PhD History, Duke University, 2009

MA History, Duke University, 2002

BA History, Communications: Boston College, 2000 

Modern Latin America; Venezuela; social movements; urban culture; and democratization.

Alejandro Velasco holds joint appointments in the Gallatin School and the Department of History, and is Executive Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas. Before NYU, he taught at Hampshire College, where he was Five College Fellow, and at Duke University. His research in the areas of social movements, urban politics, and democratization has won support from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford and Mellon Foundations, and the American Historical Association, among others, and has appeared in journals including the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Latin American Research Review, Labor, and others. Velasco's first book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (California 2015), won the 2016 Fernando Coronil Prize for best book on Venezuela, awarded biennially by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association. His teaching includes interdisciplinary courses on contemporary Latin America, among them seminars on human rights, cultural studies, and urban social movements; historical methods courses on 20th-century revolutions; graduate courses on urban political history and oral history; and workshops with primary and secondary school educators. A frequent media contributor, his editorials and analysis have appeared in NACLA, Nueva Sociedad, The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Current History, History News Network, BBC History Magazine, and others. Velasco also frequently contributes radio and television commentary in outlets including NPR, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, CBS, France 24, the BBC, and the CBC.