Calendar of Events

Peter M. Ward earned his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Liverpool in 1976. He held senior teaching positions at the Universities of London and Cambridge before moving in 1991 to The University of Texas at Austin, where he is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. He was the Director of the Mexican Center of the Institute of Latin American Studies at UT Austin from 1992 to 1996 and 2000-05. In 2000 he was appointed C.B. Smith Sr. Centennial Chair in US-Mexico Relations. Since 1997 he has coordinated the Mellon Sociology of Latin America Ph.d. Program.In addition to over one hundred articles and book chapters on public policy in Mexico and Latin America, he has written twelve books: Housing, the State and the Poor: Policy and Practice in Latin American Cities (with Alan Gilbert), Welfare Politics in Mexico: Papering Over the Cracks, and Mexico City: The Production and Reproduction of an Urban Environment (all translated into Spanish); Self-Help Housing: A Critique, Corruption, Development and Inequality (editor), Methodology for Land and Housing Market Analysis (coeditor), Political Change in Baja California: Democracy in the Making? (with Victoria Rodriguez),and Opposition Governments in Mexico: Past Experiences and Future Opportunities (with Victoria Rodriguez). Among his most recent texts are Mexico City (second edition), New Federalism and State Government in Mexico: Bringing the States Back In (with Victoria Rodriguez), Colonias and Public Policy in Texas: Urbanization by Stealth, and in 2008, Governance in the Americas: Decentralization Democracy and Subnational Government in the USA, Mexico, and Brazil (with Robert Wilson, Peter Spink and Victoria Rodríguez.) University of Notre Dame Press. A “sister” volume will appear in 2010 Metropolitan Governance in the Federalist Americas: Case Studies and Strategies for Equitable and Integrated Development (with Peter Spink and Robert Wilson), also with The University of Notre Dame Press. He is currently completing a book entitled: Informal America: Colonias, ”Wildcat” Settlements and Homestead Subdivisions.