Margaret E. Crahan

Margaret E. Crahan (1939-)

Margaret Crahan is currently [2011] the Professor and Director of the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance at St. Edward's University. An expert on Latin American history, religion and politics, Crahan has published extensively on Catholicism and human rights in Latin America.

Margaret, the daughter of the late Thomas J. Crahan and Mary Fitzgerald, was born in 1939 in Albany, New York. In 1956 she graduated from St. Patrick's High School in Catskill.

Margaret received her doctorate in history from Columbia University and has done field work in Peru, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and Switzerland on topics that span the seventeenth to twentieth centuries in Latin America.

Between 1982 and 1994 she was the 'Henry R. Luce' Professor of Religion, Power and Political Process at Occidental College, Marous Professor at the University of Pittsburgh (1993–1994) and from 1994 to 2008 the 'Dorothy Epstein' Professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York. She has served on the boards of the Kellogg Institute of the University of Notre Dame, the Fulbright Program, and the Board of Trustees of St. Edward's University, Vice President of the Board of the Interamerican Institute of Human Rights, as well as a member of the Board of the Washington Office of Latin America.

Her publications include studies of Spanish colonial administration, church-state relations, religion and politics, twentieth century Cuba, and African cultural heritage in the Caribbean.

Among other publications, she is the editor of "Religion, Culture, and Society: The Case of Cuba" (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 2003); the co-editor of "Wars on Terror and Iraq: Human Rights, Unilateralism, and U.S. Foreign Policy" (Routledge 2004) and "The City and the World: New York's Global Future" (Council on Foreign Relations 1997); and the author of "Religion and Revolution: Cuba and Nicaragua" (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 1987). Currently Crahan is working on several manuscripts, including Religion and Civil Society in Cuba. She has published chapters on religion in Cuba in numerous books, including "Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America: The Challenge of Religious Pluralism" (Orbis 1999). Crahan is a member of the executive committee of the board of trustees of the Interamerican Institute of Human Rights and of the editorial board of Human Rights Quarterly.