Paul Gootenberg, professor of history, State University of New York, Stony Brook, examines the early cocaine smuggling class, which came together across a vast expanse of shifting geographies, and, as they invented and shared new tools of the trade, represented a new form of pan-American "networking,” as well as cocaine's new transnational geographies pertaining to the "cold-war" history of the Americas.
Paul Gootenberg's research and graduate training interests span most of modern Latin America, with special strengths in Andean and Mexican history and in questions of historical sociology. His current writing centers around the history of drug commodities, especially the emergence of Andean cocaine as a global drug. Professor Gootenberg is also interested in historical dimensions of Latin American inequalities. In the first part of his career, he wrote largely about nineteenth-century Peru--its economic and social history, state formation, political economy, and the history of economic ideas. Professor Gootenberg was trained as an interdisciplinary historian at Chicago and Oxford, and maintains his broad interest in social science and historical practice, including an affiliated appointment in Sociology at the State University of New York Stony Brook.