Introducing... Dr Carlos Gerardo Zúñiga Nieto

Dr. Carlos Gerardo Zúñiga Nieto is a Virtual VRF at the Critical Childhood Studies Centre at the IAS (UCL). Previously, he worked as a lecturer at the History Department and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. He was also a visiting assistant professor of history at Boston College’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences and held a research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. In addition, he earned a PhD in Latin American History and the Caribbean from Columbia University. His specialty is colonial and modern Latin America with a focus on labor, legal, cultural and urban history, crime and punishment, and social justice—especially in Mexico—as well as particular attention to how conceptions of belonging, citizenship, and exclusion have shaped the social and historical roots of justice, crime, and law. 
 
His scholarship and teaching experience related to the legal, economic, environmental, racial, gendered, geographic, and citizenship inequalities in cities have positioned him to teach cross-disciplinary, transnational, and comparative courses. He designs interdisciplinary courses that address broad themes in the history of Latin America and the United States. His courses draw on methodologies and theories in environmental humanities, childhood studies, carceral studies, and urban studies. 

Project summary

During his fellowship with the CCSC he will be writing his book, Shouting the News: Newsboys in the Making of Modern Mexico, 1870-1970. This project investigates how newsboys shaped Mexico's public sphere between 1870 and 1970 through oral communication strategies such as the oral dissemination of proclamations, their role as city criers, their participation in the distribution and affixing edicts, and the shouting of news events. At the CCSC, he will be organizing a workshop with colleagues at UCL focusing on mass media and politics of childhood in Latin America from the early nineteenth century to the present.