Michel Gobat joins us as Associate Professor of History. His research and teaching interests focus on modern Latin America, U.S.-Latin American relations, and international history. His publications include Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Duke University Press, 2005), which explores how Nicaragua was transformed by the U.S. occupation of 1912-1933; and “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review (Dec. 2013), which addresses the question of how continents are imagined by exploring the origins and significance of the idea of Latin America. Gobat is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research. He is currently completing a book on Central America’s encounter with U.S. overseas settler colonialism during the mid-nineteenth-century era of global imperial expansion.