Steve Cote (Ph.D., history, ’11) has published Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector, the inaugural book in West Virginia University Press' new Energy and Society series. Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivia’s contentious 20th-century history. Bolivia’s oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales. Cote is an interpretive ranger for the National Park Service, stationed at Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay.

Three months after graduating, Nicholas Dias (B.A., psychology and communication, ’15) was preparing to wing his way to a writing internship in Argentina. Dias, who graduated in June 2015, planned to leave in late September for a year in Buenos Aires as part of his internship with national honors society Phi Beta Kappa. He will write for Phi Beta Kappa’s The Key Reporter and seek a job with an English-language publication in Argentina’s capital. A former California Aggie staffer, he is a data journalist—“meaning that I use my own statistical tests, rather than interviews, as the basis for my reporting.” Eventually, he’d like to attend journalism school and research the optimal roles of different types of media in informing citizens of particular democracies.