Judith Ewell has been a major figure in modern Latin American history, both as a research scholar and as a teacher. Just before receiving her PhD at the University of New Mexico in 1972, Ewell began teaching at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, from which she retired in 2004. Ewell's books include The Indictment of a Dictator: The Extradition and Trial of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1981); Venezuela: A Century of Change (1984); and Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire (1996, Spanish ed. 1998). Ewell has also published numerous articles and book chapters on modern Latin American history and women's history. She is co-editor of the much-loved biographical essay collection, The Human Tradition in Latin America (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) with William H. Beezley, with whom she served on the editorial board of Scholarly Resources Press (now Rowman & Littlefield). Most importantly, Ewell served as chief editor of this journal, The Americas, from 1998 to 2003. The Judith Ewell Prize is now awarded annually for the best Americas article in nineteenth- or twentieth-century history.Footnote ¹ — Kris Lane, Tulane University

• KL: This may be diving a bit deep at the start, but how would you assess your professional trajectory? And what was it like entering the academic world as a woman in the 1960s?

• JE: Although my career has proceeded more through serendipitous accidents than from a carefully laid-out plan, I have emerged a small winner. I was somewhat oblivious to many of the obstacles that academic women faced over much of the last half century. When I entered graduate school in 1967, men dominated faculty positions, editing and publication, professional associations, and educational administration. There were very few women in any of these branches of academe, aside from those at some of the women's colleges.Footnote ² Having received a doctorate in 1972, I was one of a small but growing cohort of women who pursued an academic career. The odds were not great that I would become a tenured full professor at a good school, a published scholar, an officer in professional associations, an editor, and an administrator. Helped by luck and generous mentors and sponsors, I have been able to enjoy modest success in my academic career.

• KL: What drew you to history, and specifically, to Latin American history? Did you have female mentors?

• JE: Women were relatively rare on university faculties when I began my career. As an undergraduate at Duke University (1961–65), aside from language teachers, I had three women professors, in botany, in history, and in political science. As a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in 1967, I do not recall any women on the History faculty. There were certainly none who taught any Latin American courses. At Duke, I did have my first taste of Latin American history by taking two courses from John Tate Lanning. I enjoyed the courses and appreciated the overlap that my concurrent study of Spanish provided. My goals, however, were to earn my certificate to teach high school social studies, so my work in US and European history seemed more relevant. Upon graduation from Duke, I did teach high school history in Bakersfield, California, for two years. California required a MA degree to receive a full teaching certificate, and I began to take some courses at night.

Impatient with studying at night after teaching all day, I decided to go to graduate school full time to earn my MA. Through a series of not especially well thought-out decisions, I found myself driving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to begin graduate work. On the way, I concluded that I would concentrate in Latin American history as a more specialized field that might offer other career opportunities if I chose to leave teaching. I fully intended, however, to return to high school teaching. A university position fell outside my imagination at the time.

For any of us at Duke who might have looked to Professor Anne Firor Scott as a role model if we aspired to an academic career, she was less than encouraging. At a panel discussion on women's career opportunities, she noted that women had difficulty in securing academic jobs. She was married to an academic, and departments usually did not hire married couples, she said. She was fortunate in that he taught at the University of North Carolina, and that Duke, nearby, had a position for which she was eligible.

There were many women in my undergraduate classes, but there were few in graduate school at the University of New Mexico, at least in Latin American history. Like many people, I found it easier to get into graduate school than to leave. Without an application or initiative on my part, I found myself in the doctoral program after one year of graduate course work. I was more fortunate than some. I learned that a highly respected male Latin Americanist at another institution had tried to discourage a woman from continuing in doctoral work. The time would just be wasted, he counseled, when you get married and have children. I also recall one male student looking around the seminar room rather scornfully when he spotted me. He queried one of his buddies why I was taking up space that might better be assigned to a male. He must have been even more annoyed to discover that I had an assistantship when he did not. To my secret satisfaction, he lasted little more than a semester.

The subject of jobs for women in academe came up when I discussed my proposed dissertation topic with my advisor, Edwin Lieuwen. I planned a dissertation on Argentinean women under the Perόns. Lieuwen shook his head sagely and counseled that history departments did not want to hire women, especially those who worked in women's history. He suggested that I work instead on the extradition and trial of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela. Since I was also interested in legal and political history, I complied, with few regrets. In the short run, he may have been wise. For many years at conferences, panels on women's history made up a kind of ghetto with women presenters and women in the audience, while the men gathered in the rooms where power and money were discussed. So I did feel like a small winner as a role model in 1980 when I formed part of a LASA panel on geopolitics with four men, including a Brazilian general.Footnote ³ At the conclusion of the panel, a young woman approached me and commented that she was glad to see a woman on such a panel and not just on panels relating to women's studies. I continued to have an interest in women's history, but did not publish in the area until much later in my career.

• KL: How did you hit upon your first job, and what was it like to be the rare woman in a major US History department starting in the 1970s?

• JE: My first very good job at the College of William and Mary turned out to be my lifetime job, and it came as the result of a series of accidents. The History Department had only recently expanded into such exotic areas as Latin America, and Nancy Farriss first held the position. She was on leave in 1970–71, and the person who replaced her in the fall could not continue in the spring, so they needed a visiting assistant professor for that period. I had completed my dissertation research in Venezuela and was home on the family farm on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in fall 1970 when Professor Lieuwen advised me of the opening and urged me to apply.

Just a couple of hours drive away, I was cheap and easy to interview in a day. Adding to my luck, my stepmother's brother had been quite active in Republican politics in Virginia, as was William and Mary's academic vice president. Uncle George put in a call to the vice president to urge him to consider me for the position. I did not realize at the time that a call from the vice president, especially one active in Republican politics, could have been the kiss of death for me in the History Department.

The interim chair who interviewed me, an Americanist, announced he'd never read a book on Latin America—and never intended to—so we conversed little about my field. I had lunch with him and the department chair, complete with martinis, and the deal was set. I did meet some of the other faculty, but only briefly for a grip and grin. They appeared to have had no say in the hiring matter. There may also have been a dearth of other candidates, because the interim chair was heard to mutter “Why are the only qualified people in Latin American history women?”

With my foot already in the door, Nancy Farriss accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania, so I stayed on at William & Mary with a visiting appointment for the following year. With no fanfare, I was switched from visiting professor to tenure track after that. They may have been pleased that I revised my dissertation in time to receive the degree in December 1972 while teaching three new courses per semester. The department placed importance on completing the degree, but considered publishing to be more of an option than a requirement. Again, I don't recall any major to-do over considering me for tenure, and I received tenure on the basis of one article, forthcoming.Footnote ⁴ The department that I entered so casually had 18 male faculty and one other woman. She had been a star undergraduate at William and Mary, studied with C. Vann Woodward at Yale, and then returned to teach at W & M. One of the brightest and most widely read people in the department and one of the best teachers, she received tenure without having completed her dissertation.

William and Mary subsequently adopted a merit system, a rigorous tenure review, and a more professional approach to hiring. At the time I began there, the History Department was much imbued with the values and outlook of the old-boy system and operated in a rather undemocratic environment in which the chair made most critical decisions. In most cases, such a system would have worked against hiring and tenuring women. By a series of accidents, however, my female colleague and I benefited from the system, and my path to a tenured job was much easier than it might have been 20 years later.

I might add that these men with whom I spent most of my professional life were mostly liberal in their outlooks and good colleagues, and I enjoyed my association with them. Their sexism was mostly of the unconscious variety, and they good-naturedly listened to suggestions that they might have some male blinkers on. I recall one discussion of a potential new position in which a colleague began by saying, “When the new man comes, he will . . . .” Almost in chorus, my female colleague and I chanted, “But what if he is a she?” (He wasn't.) By the mid 1970s the headship system also changed to one in which we had an elected chair, and most decisions were taken by majority vote.

• KL: What was it like to be both a full professor and chair in the 1990s, and what do you consider your main accomplishments in the latter post?

• JE: From 1972 until the 1990s, the ratio of women to men in the department remained the same. Most of the very few positions that opened up in the 1970s and 1980s went to men. In 1991, the Department elected me to a three-year term as chair and then, after an intervening year of leave, to a second three-year term. We had, of course, the obligatory discussion of whether I was a chairman, a chairwoman, or simply a chair. I embraced the third term, although I mentioned that I would not mind being addressed as Queen.

Suddenly we had tenure-eligible positions to fill, and I made it my mission to see that we hired as many women as possible. Our search procedure was more rigorous, with search committees who read all the candidate material, interviewed at the American Historical Association or other association meetings, and recommended who should be brought to campus. With some allies, I made sure that women were on all the short lists and received on-campus interviews. In nearly all cases, the women candidates shone in their interviews, making it somewhat easier to offer them the positions. In many a meeting or informal conversation, I repeated the mantra: if the male candidate is not demonstrably superior, affirmative action requires that we hire the woman.

Some male colleagues resisted, and others occasionally got a crush on a male candidate and became bitter because, to their eyes, he had not received a fair shake. Even so, by the end of the 1990s, there were 20 men and 10 women in the department. From roughly 10 percent women, we'd gone to about 35 percent women.

Soon, however, the attitude crept in that “We have enough women now,” and there was no continuing effort to increase the number of women faculty. The ratio of men to women faculty remained fairly stable over the next decade, or the percentage of women slipped a little. According to the American Council on Education (ACE), in 2005 there were 467,325 faculty at the assistant, associate, and full professorial ranks, 36% of whom were women.Footnote ⁵ Thus, William and Mary fell squarely within the average. I do believe, however, that the department might have lagged somewhat behind the average had I not monitored the hiring process carefully. Although it does not relate to Latin American Studies, I have felt like a small winner in the administrative role I was able to play in my home department.

• KL: Political history is making a comeback as all American nations struggle with the ramifications of post-Cold War democracy. What drew you to this field in your doctoral research?

As noted at the outset, my research field of political and diplomatic history was rather traditional, and I was aware of, but generally did not find a use for newer theoretical approaches. Still, choosing to work on Venezuelan history was somewhat uncommon. By the early 1970s, there were relatively few scholarly works on Venezuela, and most were by political scientists who had become fascinated with the origin of the modern political parties Acciόn Democrática and the Christian Democratic party, COPEI.Footnote ⁶ This research arguably rode the wave of interest in Latin American politics that followed the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and sought to highlight exemplary patterns that differed from the Cuban one. Beyond contemporary political analysis, petroleum and petroleum politics were with few exceptions considered to be the only other topics worthy of exploration. In contrast, Venezuelan historians considered colonial history to be the only real history, although the Universidad Central de Venezuela's Instituto de Estudios Histόricos launched a Castro-Gόmez project to study the 1899–1936 period, an era that contained both the roots of the petroleum economy and the origins of the modern political parties. When I told Venezuelans that Pérez Jiménez was the subject of my research, they frequently replied “Esto no es historia, es periodismo.” I should acknowledge that my dissertation research was funded by the American Association of University Women, an organization that helped to level the playing field for women who needed research support.

My first book, based on my dissertation, treated the extradition and trial of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Venezuelan dictator from 1948 to 1958. It joined the list of works that implicitly lauded the new democratic values in Venezuela.Footnote ⁷ PJ, as he was known familiarly, was the first head of state to be extradited to stand trial for common crimes of graft and embezzlement. Pérez Jiménez had also been charged with ordering the murders of some labor activists and democratic opponents. At his extradition hearings in the United States, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and common legal definitions at the time termed the crimes against persons to be political crimes and thus not subject to extradition or punishment. The US Secretary of State in 1963 directed that Pérez could not be held accountable by the Venezuelan courts for his crimes against persons.

Today, the situation has practically reversed. The International Criminal Court, as well as various ad hoc criminal tribunals, give priority to holding heads of state accountable for violations of human rights. These courts place less emphasis on the financial graft and corruption, perhaps due to the difficulty of tracing ill-gotten gains in various secret bank accounts. I also note a great change in the way extradition requests appear to be handled. In the 1950s and 1960s, there had to be an extradition treaty between the two nations involved that specified the crimes alleged. The indictment had to satisfy the courts in the country of refuge, political crimes were excluded, and there was no obligation to extradite one's own citizens. Yet today Washington regularly demands that Colombia and Mexico, among others, should extradite their citizens to stand trial in the United States. The difference may reflect the globalization of crimes relating to the drug trade. Pérez Jiménez's crimes all took place in Venezuela, while Mexican or Colombian drug traffickers often have been charged with violating US law.

As I considered projects beyond my dissertation topic, I had become intrigued with exploring modern Venezuelan history in a way that did not reduce that history simply to politics and petroleum. The nation had a diverse and interesting history between the days of Simόn Bolívar and the rise of Acciόn Democática. There was a very slim monographic base in English (and in Spanish for that matter) on which to build, so my research covered broad sweeps of history. It seemed to me to be more of a service to the field to lay out and trace evolving long-term patterns that might provide a base for others to develop more narrow topics. I also took some care to write in a way that might engage a general reader as well as a Venezuelan specialist. This was a somewhat naïve view, of course, for what general reader was likely to pick up a university press book on Venezuela, no matter how well or poorly written?

My second book, Venezuela: A Century of Change, was a brief national history, with emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It reflected my fondness for teasing out consistent or unique patterns and included more social and cultural history than was usually the case for works on Venezuela.Footnote ⁸ My third book, Venezuela and the United States: From Monroe's Hemisphere to Petroleum's Empire, brought together several of my favorite approaches: diplomatic and political history, cultural history, and a broad chronological sweep.Footnote ⁹ The book appeared in the series The United States and the Americas, under the general editorship of Lester Langley. In considering Venezuelan goals as fully as US ones, it argued that in over 150 years of relations, the weaker country had scored a number of victories—Washington could not always bring Venezuela to heel. Theodore Roosevelt was mightily frustrated that the US Congress would not allow him to invade Venezuela to punish Cipriano Castro for thumbing his nose at Washington. I also expanded the perspective from simple diplomatic exchanges to the roles that business, church groups, media, and others played in the bilateral relationship. Venezuelan novels also served as sources to illustrate Venezuelan attitudes, especially attitudes toward the United States. In effect, the book was less a diplomatic history than a broader history of relations between the two countries and their citizens.

Without being especially innovative in method or theory, my works contributed to the small list of works available in English on Venezuela. They have the merit of emphasizing cultural and social factors without ignoring politics. I only regret that more scholars have not been sufficiently intrigued by Venezuelan history to jump into the fray and make the field more vibrant and diverse. The nineteenth century would be an especially rich field for study.Footnote ¹⁰

Two of my works, Indictment of a Dictator and Venezuela and the United States, were translated and published in Venezuela.Footnote ¹¹ The translation and publication of Indictment were undertaken by an influential individual in Venezuela and taught me yet another lesson about Venezuelan politics. At the publication in 2006, the Andrés Mata Foundation flew me down to participate in a seminar on the book and arranged for a journalist to interview me for one of the major newspapers. The agenda became clear when the journalist tried in various ways to tempt me to say publicly that the dictator Pérez Jiménez was like Hugo Chávez, with the implication that Chávez too deserved jail and punishment for his crimes. Hoping to avoid any personal tours of Chávez's jails, I resisted any such explicit comparisons. But I mused about the wisdom of my Venezuelan colleagues' avoidance of writing about contemporary history.

Aside from my Venezuelan scholarship, I may have made a larger contribution to Latin American studies in preparing materials for the undergraduate classroom. William Beezley and I conjured up the idea of the Human Tradition in Latin America readers, several volumes covering all periods from the colonial through the twentieth century.Footnote ¹² The idea was to find first-rate scholars who had “five notecards left over” on relatively unknown Latin American individuals who might illustrate their time period or class. The essays were brief biographical sketches, and the volumes were intended to fill the gap in materials for the classroom between highly theoretical texts and purely narrative ones. My own experience in the classroom had revealed that the theoretical works were often tough going for undergraduate students, and I myself was less satisfied with a purely narrative account. These biographical essays appealed to students and opened the door for wide-ranging discussion. The books have been highly successful for over 25 years and are still in print.

In addition to the Human Tradition readers, Professor Beezley and I edited an extensive series of books on Latin America, first published by Scholarly Resources and currently by Rowman & Littlefield. Some were traditional monographs, and others were intended for the classroom. We made a special effort to seek out young scholars who were looking for an outlet for their first manuscript. The long list of titles gave the two publishers high visibility among those who sought out titles related to Latin America. We tried to ensure that our review process was thorough enough that tenure committees could not dismiss the publishers as “only commercial.”

The essay I contributed to the Twentieth Century Human Tradition volume, on Ligia Parra Jahn, represented one of my two ventures into gender studies, albeit still more traditional women's history than theoretical gender analysis.Footnote ¹³

In 1947 Ligia was an unusual young middle-class woman with blonde hair who had a job in a pharmacy, taking her away from the watchful eyes of chaperones. She met and thought she'd become pregnant by a Spanish jai-alai player. He planned to leave the country rather than to marry her. Deploring her destroyed honor, Ligia found a pistol and shot him dead. The debate that followed in the press fully illustrated the turmoil in Venezuela in the postwar democratic interlude that lasted from 1945 to 1948. Some feminists applauded Ligia's action in defending her honor with her own hand and argued that she should not be punished. Traditionalists referred to the law that allowed a brother or father to kill with impunity to protect a woman's honor, but not the woman herself. Modernists argued that no one should be allowed to kill for honor without punishment. Ligia did pay the price and went to prison, although not for a long sentence. This essay was one of my favorite examples of how apparently trivial incidents can illustrate tensions at play in the larger society.

My other foray into women's history was my chapter on Jeane Kirkpatrick that appeared in the book Women and American Foreign Policy [1987], edited by Edward P. Crapol.Footnote ¹⁴ The article grew from a keynote panel held at a Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) conference. Kirkpatrick famously argued that socialist or communist governments could never be reformed, but that authoritarian ones could. Her argument bolstered Washington's support for military governments of the Southern Cone in the 1980s and caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, who appointed her Ambassador to the United Nations. The public perceived her as highly influential, but in fact, male cabinet members disparaged her as “schoolmarmish” and generally ignored her. George Shultz and Alexander Haig tolerated her as Ambassador to the United Nations, but informed President Reagan that they would resign if she became National Security Director. Clearly, the upper levels of politics and diplomacy in the early 1980s remained a male preserve, even if a woman enjoyed the favor of the president.

Although Venezuelan scholarly studies did not expand much over the years, there was always a market for contemporary analysis in journalistic outlets. My having achieved some reputation for discussing Venezuelan issues in a manner that was accessible to a general public led Current History to invite me to publish a series of essays on Venezuelan affairs between 1986 and 1993.Footnote ¹⁵ On a more scholarly level, the editors of the Cambridge History of Latin America asked me to prepare the chapter on Venezuela, 1930–1989, in Volume 8.Footnote ¹⁶

After the Cambridge essay, I chose not to continue to publish on contemporary Venezuelan politics. Like many, I had been fascinated with the rise of Hugo Chávez and the collapse of the traditional democratic parties, Acciόn Democrática and COPEI, after 1992. Partly because of my duties as department chair and editor of The Americas, I spent little time in Venezuela after Hugo Chávez came to power. I did give some papers on his foreign policy, but generally I did not feel that I was following his complex regime closely enough to continue to analyze Venezuelan current affairs in print.

My most recent published work did touch tangentially on the Chávez regime. It analyzed the lessons that Che Guevara might have taken from his 1952 trip to Venezuela and the effect that his later career and writings had on Venezuela.Footnote ¹⁷ Painting with a broad brush, I concluded that the young Che in 1952 had revered labor unions, indigenous folk, and peasants, but had no use for the people he found in the Caracas urban slums. In spite of the role that slum dwellers had in forcing Pérez Jiménez from office in 1958, Venezuelan Marxists, following Che's lead, mostly ceased the organizing work they had begun with the urban poor. They abandoned the slums in the 1960s in favor of an ill-fated and relatively short-lived rural guerrilla movement. Similarly, AD and COPEI saw only violence and discord in the slums and concentrated on defeating the guerrillas and building political parties that relied heavily on organized labor, peasants, and the middle class. Chávez, inspired by the 1989 caracazo urban revolts that reawakened the memory of the 1958 activism, was the first to recognize and exploit the political and revolutionary potential of the urban poor. It is intriguing to wonder what political path Venezuela might have taken if the revolutionary left had continued its nascent efforts in 1958 to organize and politicize the barrios.

• KL: If a younger scholar asked for advice regarding professional organizations, what would you say?

• JE: From the beginning of my academic life, I came to value annual conferences for the opportunity to interact with old graduate student friends, to make new friends, and to keep up with what was going on in the field. In the 1970s, there were very few women scholars who attended the American Historical Association. I used to joke that I made sure to wear my nametags there, so I would not be mistaken for a wife or for a hooker working the crowd. It was gratifying as the years marched on to see more women, and the huge conferences did not seem quite so alienating. The Conference on Latin American History, which met concurrently with the AHA, provided a more intimate opportunity to interact with Latin American historians. In 1992, I was honored to be elected president of CLAH, the second woman to hold that position.

I also attended and participated in the Latin American Studies Association, where there were more women present. I must confess, however, that I always enjoyed the smaller regional conferences more than the large conferences and was especially active in the South Eastern Council of Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) and the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies (RMCLAS). When my colleagues queried me as to why I was attending a Rocky Mountain conference, I responded that Virginia's first grant extended from sea to sea, so we did qualify as a Rocky Mountain state. Some of my colleagues in the mid-Atlantic region (Jack Child, Charles Ameringer, Pope Atkins, and others) and I believed that the regional conferences had left a major geographic black hole in our area.

One of the merits of the regional conferences was that they tended to be less expensive, since people could drive to them. They were often held on or near campuses, allowing graduate and undergraduate students to participate. Scholars in Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, DC, and West Virginia were sometimes stretched to attend the New England or Southern conferences. In 1978, then, we proudly launched the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies (MACLAS). Some wag noted that it might also be called the “I-95 Conference” since most conferences were held only a stone's throw from that highway. The association proved to have staying power and took its place among the active regional conferences. My colleagues elected me to serve as president of the association in 1985–86.

I also enjoyed the smaller Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) conferences, where diplomatic historians gathered, and I presented a number of papers there. Similarly I attended many conferences of the Caribbean Studies Association, especially in the years when Venezuela was asserting its Caribbean identity. I mused that if I persisted in attending every year, I would eventually have visited most of the Caribbean islands. It was also refreshing to attend a conference in which minority scholars often outnumbered Caucasians and in which issues of race permeated many of the panels. And the dancing was certainly livelier than at the more staid AHA.

Membership in such a variety of professional associations proved beneficial in demonstrating that different disciplines or subject fields often had different styles in research and analysis. It brought back the epiphany I experienced when I first chose history as my concentration at Duke. I concluded that the decision postponed a real choice, since I could focus on social history, political history, economic history, cultural history or whatever I wished. From that time, I have always enjoyed examining human events from a broad, rather than a narrow, perspective. The preference for breadth flavored not only my research, but also my teaching.

• KL: What advice might you offer to younger scholars whose primary responsibility is undergraduate teaching?

• JE: Like many of us who came from a large and active doctoral program in Latin American studies, I hoped for years to find a job in such a program. Over time, however, I came to appreciate the high quality of William and Mary students and thought perhaps I could do more good in enhancing understanding of and empathy for Latin America in an institution that did not have a strong core of Latin American students and faculty. For about 25 years, I was the only Latin Americanist in the History Department, so my teaching responsibilities were varied. For some years I taught the colonial and national histories of Latin America, history of Mexico, history of Brazil, history of the Caribbean, and even history of Spain. For my first years at the college, I also taught US history, a resume line that proved useful when I applied for Fulbright professorships in Latin America. Aside from one seminar, I never taught a course on Venezuela. This experience—which I know many of us share—is quite different from that of faculty who teach in institutions with a large Latin American doctoral program.

Still I did have some Latin Americanists as colleagues at William and Mary. By accident rather than by plan, the college had hired excellent scholars of Latin America in the fields of government, anthropology, and Spanish. Thus students could put together a credible undergraduate interdisciplinary program in Latin American studies. If they went on to government service or business or graduate work in another field, their Latin American studies still provided a good background. Outliers for sure, but at least two of my undergraduates went on to graduate work in Latin American history and have become productive members of the profession. Just as Duke's John Tate Lanning allowed as how he would take some credit for my coming into the field, I have been proud of the W & M undergraduates who went on to academic careers in Latin American history. I am also proud though of those who became Peace Corps Volunteers, lawyers, doctors, Red Cross workers, fruit inspectors, and horse breeders.

William and Mary has a doctoral program in history, but it is restricted to American (that is, US) history, so I had no opportunity to guide doctoral research in my field. These doctoral students were required to have one field outside American history, and quite a few chose Latin America as a logical complementary field. A few made some use of Latin American material in their research. Most of them, however, speculated correctly that their job prospects at small liberal arts colleges might be enhanced if they could teach something outside of their major field. My goal then became to have them choose a wide range of reading in Latin American studies, and their final project was to prepare a detailed syllabus and reading list for a course they might teach. I also required that they have some depth in a Latin American field of interest to them, perhaps indigenous studies, women's history, African-American history, labor history, or some other. Neither they nor I had any illusions that they could go toe to toe with scholars in the field, but at least they had had an introduction to the best of the secondary literature, and they had thought through and organized an approach to teaching a course for undergraduates. The material could also be useful if they had an opportunity to teach a world history or world cultures class or perhaps a comparative seminar on, for example, women in the Americas. In this way, I felt as though I had made an indirect contribution to the competent undergraduate teaching of Latin American history.

• KL: How would you describe your experiences teaching in South America?

• JE: I was fortunate to have two opportunities to teach as a Fulbright scholar in Latin America, first in 1979–80 in Venezuela at the Universidad Catόlica Andrés Bello (UCAB) and later in 1994–95 at the Universidad Andina in Quito, Ecuador. In Venezuela, I taught US history, Mexican history, and a seminar on urban history in the Americas in a newly established graduate program. The Venezuelan students were often teachers who were trying to enhance their credentials, and they struggled through Caracas traffic to come to class at night after a full day of teaching or work. In spite of limited Spanish-language bibliography and limited time, they were energetic and enthusiastic. Much of the history they had previously studied was either Venezuelan history or a more general world history course. Some of the US style (or at least my style) in teaching and learning was new to them. I recall asking one student to discuss in class how and why Buenos Aires had grown the way it had, and he responded that it was “the expansion of world capitalism.” In fact, that was his response to nearly any question I might pose. “That's fine,” I pressed him, “but what in particular affected Buenos Aires?” I lectured in Spanish, struggling to write my lectures ahead of time and search out the words or phrases I wasn't familiar with. I also constantly struggled with drawing a distinction between their work en equipo which was almost necessary because of the limited sources available to them and plagiarism. Academic cultural patterns are strong, though. When I returned to William & Mary, I tried to encourage more students to work together in teams on their projects, and they resisted as strongly as the Venezuelans had resisted doing their work alone.

Other cultural patterns also sank into my consciousness. Partially because of traffic and partially because of a national tendency to arrive late for any appointment, many of my Venezuelan students would arrive in class well after it had begun. Since they considered it rude simply to slide into their seats quietly, they would approach me as I was lecturing for a big abrazo and a warm “¿Cómo está, profesora?” When I returned to W & M, I quite missed all the hugs.

In Ecuador, I also taught in a graduate program. This time it was a seminar on bandits and outlaws in the Americas, and I began my own project by looking for nineteenth-century social bandits in the Ecuadoran archives. Some excellent professional historians took the course, and I learned as much from them, if not more, than they from me. There were some more junior historians, though, and I recall marking up one final paper quite extensively. The young woman came to my office nearly in tears, but it turned out they were tears of gratitude. No one, she said, had ever evaluated or commented on the papers she had written in her university career.

These two experiences convinced me that international teaching exchanges can improve teaching in general and enrich our own ideas of how learning proceeds. One not only learns to cope in different academic settings, but often can see more clearly the biases and habits that one can fall into with teaching the same material to similar students year after year. I served for several years on some of the Fulbright selection committees, and I was delighted to contribute to what I hoped would be an enriching experience for students and faculty.

• KL: What was your time as editor of the Americas like?

• JE: I found especially rewarding my tenure as the first woman editor of The Americas (1998–2003). The journal was in good shape when I arrived, so there were no fires to put out, nor wheels to reinvent. There was a very active and professional editorial board that met quarterly and shared much of the work of article reviewing. In addition to stand-alone articles, we sometimes published thematic issues. I was pleased to solicit articles and shepherd through a thematic issue on material culture in Latin America, having absorbed much about the topic from the proximity of Colonial Williamsburg and the work of William and Mary graduate students. I oversaw our first hesitant steps toward bringing the journal online through Project Muse and JSTOR. At that time, we were all quite concerned that online accessibility might undercut the financial health of the journal. Happily, it did not, as the journal is thriving, and it is difficult to imagine today that a major journal would not be available electronically.

The editorial assistants and managing editors—Kathleen, Carlos, and Carl, in my day—did a great job of managing day-to-day tasks. I think for my first few months in the position, I must have had a leave, or it was summer, because I had time to get acquainted with the office staff. When I was teaching again, I'd go to DC from Williamsburg about every two weeks—Thursday afternoon train up and Monday afternoon train back—and had enough time to catch up with what we couldn't handle by email. It could have worked only with good assistants, and those Catholic University of America doctoral students were tops.

When I first got to DC, Kathleen was using software that got the text ready for the publisher, at the time an old-style print shop. If you just sent the raw text to the print shop, they would make it printer-ready, but charged a bunch. I think that at the time Kathleen left I somehow found out about professionals who did the intermediate step. We engaged a couple from Florida, and life was much easier: just send them the manuscript copy, and they made it printer-ready and shipped it to the publisher. It didn't cost too much, and was one small step toward making things more professional and not having to train new assistants in the tedious software.

Then we got into both Project Muse and JSTOR. JSTOR wasn't too much of a decision, since it dealt with past issues; there was a one- to two-year delay before digitizing. We (the editorial board and I) did agonize about Project Muse, though, fearful that it would undercut our subscription base. The Academy of American Franciscan History provided a subsidy, but liked to have us as close to self-supporting as possible. Fortunately, the change didn't have too much effect on our bottom line in the short run, and it was clear that it really was necessary from the way libraries were going.

Happily, I didn't have to do much of the nuts and bolts of budget managing, since the CUA accounting department did that. They drove me into agony though when they took up an accounting software by PeopleSoft. I needed it only to see our budget and check how things were going, but it was pretty complex and whatever guides I had were not adequate. One day I was at CUA fooling around and trying to get into the program when I got a phone call: “What are you doing?” someone asked. “You're screwing up the whole university system!” Humbly I apologized, logged off, and begged for an idiot-proof guide. I guess it worked, or maybe I never looked again. But thankfully I didn't have to call the good Franciscan brothers for intervention.

Finally, I organized and prepared the theme issue on material culture that I mentioned earlier. It proved a bit of a challenge to solicit the pieces and get them reviewed, and, as I recall, some members of the editorial board were a little suspicious of articles that didn't follow all the history protocols. Other than that, all worked well.

We took pride in the fact that our articles were probably vetted more thoroughly than at any other journal. Not only did we have the two standard blind reviewers, but the entire board read all the articles and reviews at our quarterly meetings and made suggestions. Often, we'd read them when they first came in and later check the revisions. That sometimes got tricky when a board member read something quickly and went on a tear about what the author needed to do. I generally handled things in my semi-authoritarian way. If something seemed to be really important to a board member, I tried to nudge authors in that direction. If I thought it might be a whim of the moment and likely to be forgotten, I didn't press the authors too hard for a particular change. And I was aware of time lags; sometimes if I thought an author had made acceptable revisions and it was a long while before a board meeting, I just accepted the piece and went on. Our record on lag time between submission and final acceptance wasn't too bad, considering the possibilities for delay.

I can't think of anything else, except my anxiety about interaction with the good brothers of the Academy—that is until I realized we had a meeting of minds on good eating and good drinking. They were an interesting and fun bunch, and when Brother Dismas got his Town Car revved up on the way to drinks and dinner, better get out of the way!

• KL: You retired from William & Mary in 2004. What have you been up to since?

• JE: I had always thought that I would continue to research and write after my retirement from teaching, but I found that I was more eager for new experiences and learning than for doing more of what I'd been doing. I turned my attention to photography. I've taken a number of workshops, photo tours, and classes, and fully enjoy finding a new field in which the possibility for learning and improving is almost infinite. Photography-centered travel is also varied, and I've had an opportunity to photograph in Morocco, Wales, Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, Nova Scotia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and Mexico. It's quite exciting to try to see new places through a camera lens with a small group of congenial people.

But I didn't give up history and teaching altogether. I also took up lecturing on cruise ships several times a year. I found the challenge of adapting material to a general audience to be fulfilling. I had seldom used visual materials in my classroom teaching, but for the cruises I taught myself how to use PowerPoint, primarily to present the visuals. To my surprise, I found the process of preparing a lecture to be entirely different with heavy use of visuals. I always began with an outline and then sought images to illustrate the lecture. Often though, I did not find the visual I wanted, but found something else that was so compelling that I changed the entire lecture around.

The cruises were great fun, allowing me an opportunity to visit places in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean that I'd wanted to return to, or to get a brief taste of places I had never visited. It was also nice not to worry about blue books, testing, and grading, although I discovered that student evaluations follow you everywhere! One fellow thought I could have shortened my talk on Brazil quite a bit if I had just announced that the country was corrupt and always would be. And before one lecture on the Cayman Islands, one guest demanded to know how I could talk for half an hour about a sand bar! I might have responded, but didn't, that Google and Wikipedia have a wealth of information even on sand bars.

• KL: Any last thoughts?

• JE: I've often thought of myself in relationship to the modest, fictionalized character Brás Cubas, of whom his nineteenth-century Brazilian creator, the novelist Machado de Assis, wrote: “I did not achieve celebrity. I did not become a minister of state. I did not really become a caliph. . . . At the same time, however, I had the good fortune of not having to earn my bread by the sweat of my brow. . . . Adding up and balancing all these items, a person will conclude that my accounts showed neither a surplus nor a deficit and consequently that I died quits with life.”Footnote ¹⁸

I believe that my first 50 years in academe have seen enough modest successes that I have been a small winner. Beginning in a period in which women comprised ten percent or less of faculty positions and concluding in a period in which they represent from a third to nearly half, those 50 years have brought a sea change in academe. Still, over the years, the changes were gradual rather than sharp, and it is only in retrospect that I can appreciate how far we've come. Without having been in a major Latin American doctoral program and without having contributed any theoretical advances to the scholarly literature, I believe that my teaching, administration, editing, and publications have made a small but positive and incremental contribution to Latin American studies.