Ricardo Lagos Escobar, former president of the Republic of Chile, officially began a five-year term as a professor-at-large on July 1.
Lagos, whose position is based at the Watson Institute for International Studies, will spend October on campus delivering lectures and working with students and faculty to design "policy-relevant" research projects, said Barbara Stallings, director of the institute.
Lagos' first event on campus will be a conference in early October that will also feature former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, another professor-at-large who is now in the final year of his five-year appointment at Brown.
Stallings said it is likely that Lagos and Cardoso will spend time collaborating while at Brown, describing the two as "close friends and colleagues."
"One of the reasons that President Lagos agreed to accept our invitation was because he heard from President Cardoso that he had had a good experience here over the last four years," she said.
The Herald was unable to reach Lagos for an interview.
Under Lagos' leadership from 2000 to 2006, Chile signed free trade agreements, established unemployment insurance, expanded healthcare coverage and extended compulsory schooling.
After a military coup seized power in Chile in 1973, Lagos went into exile, but later he returned home and became a leader of the opposition to General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled the country until 1990.
"Chile has been an important leader both in the re-democratization trend in Latin America and also in terms of economic and social development," Stallings said. "(Lagos) will be able to bring firsthand experience to these questions for students to understand them better and for the public to understand more about what's going on in that particular part of the world."
Brown's Latin America program already stands out among its peers, Stallings said, having recently been awarded a Department of Education Title IV grant, which is a highly selective grant awarded for the study of international cultures and institutions. It has a larger number of people involved than any of Brown's other regional programs and is "far and away our most important one," Stallings said.
Stallings said Lagos' appointment is also an indication of the University's commitment to internationalization.
"What the internationalization initiative is about ... is both to bring the rest of the world to Brown to a greater extent and to send Brown out to the rest of the world," she said.
Lagos' appointment contributes to both goals, Stallings said, giving Brown a higher profile and opening up opportunities for collaboration for students and faculty through the use of Lagos' contacts in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America.
With the addition of Lagos, the University now has five professors-at-large. Of the five, three - Lagos, Cardoso and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke '62 - are based at the Watson Institute.
Marta DaSilva '09, an international relations and history concentrator who plans to study abroad in Latin America in the spring, said bringing in these types of figures is "a huge deal for a lot of IR students."
Because the concentration is interdisciplinary and offers four tracks, it is often difficult to separate all of the things that go on within the IR program and find a focus, DaSilva said. She said going to lectures by figures such as those serving as professors-at-large at Brown is important because it's "more interactive" and helps to engage students in the subject matter.
"When you actually meet the people that do this for a living, it kind of puts everything in perspective and helps the people that are concentrating in the department decide what they're actually doing with their concentration," she said.
