Nicola Miller is Reader in Latin American History at University College London. Her previous books include Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959-1987 (1989) and In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (1999). She is currently working on a history of intellectuals and modernity in Latin America.

Stephen Hart was educated at Downing College, Cambridge, and is Professor of Hispanic Studies at University College London, where he teaches courses on Latin American literature and film. He has published A Companion to Spanish American Literature (1999), A Companion to Latin American Film (2004) and co-edited Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies (2003). He holds an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, and has been awarded the Orden al Mérito by the Peruvian government for his work on César Vallejo.

This collection of essays provides a very important contribution to the analysis of the discourse, practices and institutions of modernity in Latin America. Rather than agreeing on the usefulness of the analytical place of modernity, the authors--who come from various disciplines and are leading experts on different countries--disagree and debate implicitly with one another. This creates a collection that serves as a fascinating tool for learning about the ambiguous and tension-ridden connections of Latin American societies to some of the central ideas and institutions of Western modernity."
--Luis Roniger, Reynolds Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies, Wake Forest University