J. PATRICE MCSHERRY

Long Island University Professor J. Patrice McSherry teaches Comparative Politics, with a specialization in Latin America; International Relations; and courses on human rights, international political economy, and foreign policy. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). Her first teaching appointment was at State University of New York (SUNY)-New Paltz (1994-1997).

McSherry moved to LIU in 1997. She is founding chair and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at the campus. She won LIU’s David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008 and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Political Science MA-Ph.D Program of the CUNY Graduate Center in 2009. Twice awarded Fulbright grants (Argentina, 1992; Uruguay, 2005), McSherry is the author of two books and coauthor of a third, and has published a number of book chapters and many scholarly articles on military regimes, civil-military relations, state terror, including Operation Condor, transitions to democracy, and U.S. foreign policy.

McSherry has traveled extensively in Latin America and has lived in Argentina and Uruguay. She has closely observed the social movements of the region since the 1970s and has dedicated much study and analysis to the role of military and paramilitary forces.

McSherry's first book, INCOMPLETE TRANSITION: MILITARY POWER AND DEMOCRACY IN ARGENTINA, is a standard in the field. It was reissued in paperback in 2008 through the Authors Guild.

Her 2005 book PREDATORY STATES: OPERATION CONDOR AND COVERT WAR IN LATIN AMERICA, was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title in 2006 by Choice, the leading library journal. It has been used as a resource in human rights trials in Latin America and has been extensively cited. McSherry examined thousands of recently declassified U.S. documents as well as archives in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the course of her research on Operation Condor. A translated and updated version of the book was published by Editorial LOM of Chile and Ediciones de Banda Oriental of Uruguay in 2009.

McSherry's studies on Condor have been cited by The New York Times, Newsweek, and many Latin American and European media. She has appeared as a featured analyst in several documentaries.

THE IRAQ PAPERS is a documentary reader focused on the George W. Bush policy of preemption and its application in both foreign and domestic policy. The book examines numerous facets of the war in Iraq, including its origins in neoconservative thinking and its deeper roots in theories of rollback during the Cold War and earlier patterns of U.S. intervention. The book includes comprehensive historical and contextual analysis and features a collection of key primary documents, exploring the war's impact on international relations, the Middle East, human rights and international law, and democracy at home.

McSherry worked with several non-governmental organizations on human rights issues before graduate school. In 2001 she taught a graduate mini-course on military politics at the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil and in 2005 she gave several lectures on Operation Condor in Montevideo, Uruguay. She is Associate Editor for Latin America for Journal of Third World Studies and serves on the editorial board of the journal Social Justice.