Laird W. Bergad is Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history in the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College and the Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the founding director of Lehman College's interdisciplinary program in Latin American and Caribbean studies and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies, and he served on the executive committees of the CUNY/Cuba (and later Caribbean) Scholarly Exchange Program and the CUNY-University of Puerto Rico Exchange. Bergad is the founding and current director of the CUNY Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the Graduate Center. His previously published books include Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico; Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas; The Cuban Slave Market, 1790 1880 (co-author); The Demographic and Economic History of Slavery in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720 1888; and The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States.
