Agrarian Studies Colloquium - Madre de las aguas: The Life and Death of Glaciers in Bolivia’s Cordillera Real

Sarah Hines is an assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma where her research and teaching focus on Latin America and the Caribbean with an emphasis on histories of the environment, infrastructure, race and ethnicity, and social movements. Her current book project, “Water for All: Revolution, Property, and Community in Twentieth-Century Bolivia,” is a social, political, and environmental history of water access and hydraulic engineering in Bolivia from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. The book focuses on the Cochabamba Valley, long a site of intense conflict over water access and hydraulic infrastructure. The project has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Inter-American Foundation, the UC Berkeley Institute for International Studies, and the Barnard College Alumnae Association. The book manuscript is based on her 2015 dissertation, “Dividing the Waters: How Power, Property and Protest Transformed the Waterscape of Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1879-2000,” which won the UC Berkeley History Department Dissertation Prize and the New England Council of Latin American Studies Dissertation Prize. A related article, “The Power and Ethics of Vernacular Modernism: The Misicuni Dam Project in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1944–2017,” appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review in May 2018.
Hines was born in Maryland and raised in Massachusetts. She graduated magna cum laude with honors in history from Barnard College where her undergraduate thesis was titled “Strikebreaking and Solidarity: Farm Workers’ Insurgency and Mexican Braceros, 1947-1951.” After college, Hines taught social studies at Taft High School in the Bronx, NY for several years, during which time she earned an MEd in social studies education from the City College of New York and traveled frequently to Latin America. In 2006, Hines received a Fulbright IIE fellowship to conduct oral historical research on the relationship between the history of mine union organizing and recent social movements in Bolivia. She holds an MA and a PhD in Latin American history from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at OU, Hines was a visiting professor of history and Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Smith College and an assistant professor of history at the University of Maine at Machias.