Juandrea Bates

Professor Bates is an internationally recognized scholar of Latin American history, law, and family policy. Both her scholarship and her classes explore how marginalized groups struggle to cope with and overcome adversity as well as how regular people shape the course of history.

Professor Bates teaches survey classes in Latin American History and World History. She also leads upper-division courses, such as Age, Gender and Migration, Social Revolution in Latin America, The History of Childhood, Women, Gender and Sexuality in Latin American History and Crime and Punishment in Latin America. 

All of Dr. Bates’ classes introduce students to history using primary sources. She encourages students to develop their own arguments about the past through research projects – sometimes papers and just as often blogs, websites and podcasts.

Professor Bates received her BA 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 to 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: Family Policy, Inequality, and Justice in Buenos Aires 1871-1930.” Based on a collection of more than 500 never-before-accessed lawsuits and pension petitions, the project recreates everyday experiences of childhood 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.