Paul Eliot Gootenberg is a historian of Latin America who specializes in the history of the Andean drug trade, the fields of Peruvian and Mexican history, as well as historical sociology. He earned an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford (1981) and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985), and is currently a professor of history and co-director of Latin American Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been both a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow. Along with the historian and the sociologist Daniel Levy, he is a coordinator of the Stony Brook Initiative for Historical Social Sciences.