Maxwell School News and Commentary

“If the U.S. dismissed him wholeheartedly, it’s going to make these conversations—and again some of these are happening behind closed doors—a hell of a lot more difficult to be had,” says Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair on Mexico-U.S. Relations, regarding the immigration talks between the U.S. and Mexico as Title 42 lifts this week.

“When China and Brazil sign an agreement like this, it’s trying to put into place the infrastructure that would make it possible to use China’s currency, but that doesn’t mean that individual firms are going to choose that,” says Daniel McDowell, associate professor of political science.

The associate professor of history is working on a book and publicly accessible database of people who were enslaved in British Crown colonies in the Caribbean. 

The professor of geography and the environment will spend part of the summer researching peatlands and helping develop a doctoral program in Chile. 

Gladys McCormick, associate professor of history, says Mexico already has a significant police and military presence on its side of the border and efforts to confront the cartels militarily have not solved the problem. “It’s been tried and it has failed colossally,” McCormick says. “So the idea to sort of try it again to me sounds utterly irresponsible.”

The Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions (FEEGI) awarded its 2022 book prize to Tessa Murphy, associate professor of history, for her book "The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean." 

"The Lifeworld of Elizabeth Symons: Family Biography and Atlantic Geographies in the Eighteenth Century," authored by Karl Offen, professor of geography and the environment, was published in the Journal of Historical Geography.

"Here we have yet one more opportunity to fully flesh out and understand what went wrong with the drug war in Mexico and why it could arguably be considered to be a colossal failure," says Gladys McCormick, associate professor of history and Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations.

Capturing Ovidio Guzmán could be a way for López Obrador to show the U.S. that he is “in control of the armed forces and Mexico’s security situation,” Gladys McCormick, Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-U.S. Relations, tells CNN. “It also defuses the power behind any ask from the Biden administration to stem the tide of fentanyl and other narcotics across the border,” she adds.

Published by Cultural Dynamics, Christopher DeCorse, professor and chair of anthropology, reviews "Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World," where the authors examine the economic and political restructuring of 19th century slavery through contemporary paintings, plans and images.