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Richard "Dick" McGee Morse, Ph.D. was a Latin Americanist scholar and professor at Columbia University, University of Puerto Rico, Yale University and Stanford University before finishing his career at the Wilson Center in Washington DC.
Morse was born in Summit, New Jersey, United States, but moved with his family at a young age to Greenwich, Connecticut. After graduating from the Hotchkiss School, Morse enrolled at Princeton University in 1939, where he studied literature with Allen Tate and R. P. Blackmur. As a student, Morse studied in Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, and graduated magna cum laude with a major in the School of Public and International Affairs.
Following World War II, Morse continued his academic and literary career, becoming an expert in Latin American studies. Morse was chairman of Latin American Studies at Yale University before moving to Stanford University in the late 1970s. In 1984 he moved to Washington DC with his wife Emerante, when he became Secretary of Latin American Affairs at the Wilson Center, a "think tank" associated with the Smithsonian Institution. Morse was one of the first academics in the United States to offer a nontraditional analysis of Latin America by suggesting, often to the dismay of contemporaries, that English-speaking North America had much to learn from the cultures of Spanish-, Portuguese- and French-speaking countries of the South.
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