Dear Professor x:
John Cross is applying for the opening in your department and I want to wholeheartedly support his candidacy. John Cross finished his dissertation with me in 1993. Dr. Cross's dissertation and current research relate to the social and political organization of street markets and vendors, and, more broadly, the intersection of individual economic strategies and political structures. His dissertation research was done primarily in Mexico City, while he was also teaching there. But he has also developed comparative interests, including markets in Los Angeles and Cairo in his research design.
For the past three years Dr. Cross has been teaching at the American University in Cairo. He chose this intriguing position for several reasons, including the opportunity to extend his research on urban economies to a radically different cultural context. Cairo and Mexico City actually have many things in common, including high unemployment and population growth, an authoritarian and corrupt state, and a dependence on the informal street economy. In these years he has been able to publish from his Mexico City materials, enriched by comparative data from Cairo, and he has completely re-written his dissertation into a manuscript that has recently been accepted at Stanford University Press. He has developed a unique theoretical perspective that combines rational choice, political clientelism and a modified bureaucratic authoritarianism approach to understanding the intersection between street vending and politics. He presented his two most recent papers at the ASA last year, and I believe that he is moving in an exciting direction.
John is a first-rate economic sociologist, an accomplished Latin Americanist with a growing competence in the Middle East as well. Beyond this, his teaching expertise includes courses on race and ethnicity, economic development and social theory. His demanding position at AUC has meant that he has not published as much in the past three years as one might like, but his hard work now seems to be paying off. He has recent or forthcoming papers in Latin American Perspectives, in the Revista Mexicana de Sociologia, and other papers in the pipeline. He is an extremely energetic and devoted scholar and, by all accounts, a fine teacher. I recommend him highly. Please feel free to contact me if you would like any more information about John Cross.
Sincerely,
David E. Lopez
Associate Professor of Sociology
Chair, Latin American Studies Programs
David Lopez
Chair, Latin American Studies Programs
Sociology Department
UCLA
Los Angeles 90095-1551
dlopez@soc.ucla.edu
310-825-1416
fax: 310-206-9838