Welcome to my virtual space! My name is Benjamin Waddell and I am from a quaint town in southern Colorado named Norwood. As a child, I was fortunate enough to grow up in the grace of the majestic San Juan mountains and though in the past I have often found myself far from them, I currently reside in the San Luis Valley, which is a high mountain valley located between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountain ranges. My journey to the San Luis Valley, where I work at Adams State University (ASU) as an Assistant Professor of Sociology, began in 2001 at Fort Lewis college in Durango, Colorado, where I studied for a year before transferring to the University of Colorado at Boulder. In undergrad, I majored in International Relations and in 2004 I spent six months living in Managua, Nicaragua. Upon graduating from CU I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I lived and studied at la Universidad de Buenos Aires for eight months before beginning an odyssey that took me -via bus, train, car, small plane and boat- from the Rio de Plata in Buenos Aires to the cradle of Mexican independence in Guanajuato, México. My stopping point was not without purpose. While living in Buenos Aires I fell in love with a young women from Guanajuato who was also studying abroad. For that reason, in the spring of 2006, I settled down in Guanajuato, a place I have since revisited countless times and now consider a second home. That fall I began my graduate work in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico, where I lived until I relocated to Alamosa in the Spring of 2011.
Taken together, this site expands on three aspects of my life: research, teaching and study abroad. Whether you are a current student or a virtual vagabond, I hope that you find my page’s contents useful. Please feel free to send me feedback!
