Juandrea Bates

Biography

Professor Bates teaches and researches in the field of Latin American history. She is particularly interested in the intersections of inequality, the law, family and childhood in modern Argentina. Both her scholarship and her classes reflect her deep fascination regarding how regular people mobilize and shape the world around them and how marginalized groups struggle to cope with and overcome adversity. Professor Bates teaches survey classes in Latin American History 1492 to the Present and U.S. History Since 1865. She also leads upper-division courses such as Social Revolution in Latin America, The History of Childhood, Dirty Wars and Dictators in Latin America, Women in Latin American History and Crime and Punishment in Latin America. She looks forward to developing courses on World History, Latino and Borderlands History and U.S. Latin American Relations. All of Dr. Bates’ classes introduce students to history through the use of primary sources. She encourages students to develop their own arguments about the past, and pushes students to conduct their own primary source research. Professor Bates received her B.A. in History from a college very similar to this one, the State University of New York College at Oneonta. She then moved south to the land of sunshine, breakfast tacos and music: Austin, Texas. There she completed an MA and PhD in Latin American history at the University of Texas. Her research and scholarship were supported by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, The Council for Library Information Research, the Teresa Lozano Long Foundation, and the University of Texas. This support allowed her live in Buenos Aires, Argentina while conducting archival research and exploring the Southern Cone, Mexico and Central America. She got her first experience in the Midwest when she was a Hurst Institute for Legal History Fellow in the summer of 2015. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled "Raising Argentina: Childhood, Family, and Popular Participation in Civil Justice, Buenos Aires 1871-1930." Based on a collection of more than three hundred never before accessed custody battles, the project recreates everyday experiences of childhood, child rearing and parenting in late 19th-century Argentina and explores how dramatic demographic, economic and political changes in the early 20th-century affected the most intimate aspects of people's lives. In doing so, her research demonstrates that legal distinctions regarding what kinship bonds constituted a legal family and what youths counted as children became critical to shaping social, economic and legal inequality in the Argentine Republic. Recently her work has appeared in Voices of Crime: Constructing and Contesting Social Control in Modern Latin America.

Research Interest

Research interests in the intersections of inequality, the law, family and childhood in modern Argentina.