Laird W. Bergad is an American historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, currently a Distinguished Professor[1] and founding Director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Lehman College.
[5] He has traveled widely through Latin America and has lived for extended periods both in Cuba and Brazil.
Professor Bergad’s research has centred on the social, economic, and demographic history of slave-based plantation societies in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The first, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton University Press, 1990), documented the growth of the sugar plantation economy in the Cuban province of Matanzas during the 19th century.
His most recent works are Puerto Rican Rural Society in the Early Twentieth Century, a study of Puerto Rican history under U.S. rule, and a social, economic, and demographic history of Latinos in the New York metropolitan area 1900–2016.