Michael Powers, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South Global South Research Fellowship

Michael Powers

Global South Fellowship 2016
University of Arkansas

Biography

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Arkansas, specializing in the U.S. South and Latin America.

Research

My project, “‘The Commercial Union of the Three Americas:’ Major Edward A. Burke and Transnational New South Visionaries, 1870-1928,” examines the reciprocal links connecting the U.S. and Latin America to the forces of globalization in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I specifically analyze the ways Southerners who pursued increased commercial and political ties with Latin America comprised a dynamic transnational aspect of a New South vision that swept the former Confederacy. Exploring social and political exchanges on the ground, my project utilizes American and Hispanic perspectives to demonstrate how the interplay between both regions was the defining variable in their respective developments during a shared, if conflictual, history.       

To do so, I focus my study on Louisiana and Latin American politics, particularly the 1884 New Orleans World's fair and Central American liberalism.