No End in Sight: The Unwinding and Afterlife of the Cold War in Latin America

Greg Grandin, Yale University

Steve Hahn, New York University

Steve Hahn received his B.A. at the University of Rochester, his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale University, and is currently Professor of History at New York University.  Previously he was on the faculties of the University of Delaware (1979-1981), the University of California San Diego (1981-1998), Northwestern University (1998-2003), and the University of Pennsylvania (2003-2016), where he was the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of History. Hahn is a specialist on the international history of slavery, emancipation, and race, on the construction of American empire, on the social and political history of the “long nineteenth century” in the United States, and on the history of social movements. 

Tanya Harmer, London School of Economics

Dr. Tanya Harmer is an Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (2011) and Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (2020).

Rebecca Herman, University of California, Berkeley

Rebecca Herman is Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on modern Latin America, US-Latin American relations, and environmental politics. Her current research examines international environmental politics in the late 20th century, and includes a book project on extractivism in the global commons as well as shorter pieces on environmental activism in Latin America. Most recently, she published "Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina" in the journal Environmental History, which reconstructs the history of Greenpeace International's first office outside the global North. Her first book, Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

Mateo Jarquín, Chapman University

Mateo Jarquín is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Master’s Program in War, Diplomacy, and Society at Chapman University. His research explores the intersection of democracy, revolutions, and international relations in modern Latin America. He is the author of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2024), which received the 2025 Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Related articles have appeared in journals such as Cold War History and The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History. His scholarship has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, among other organizations. In addition to his historical research, he writes regularly about contemporary Central American politics. Originally from Nicaragua, Jarquín holds a PhD from Harvard University and a BA from Grinnell College.

Elizabeth Jelin, CONICET/IDES

Argentine social scientist engaged in research on social inequalities, human rights, gender and the family, social movements, and memories of political repression. 

Senior Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) at CIS - IDES (Institute of Economic and Social Development) in Buenos Aires. Fellow, International Science Council. 

Among her publications: Los trabajos de la memoria (English edition: State Repression and the Labors of Memory), La lucha por el pasado. Cómo construimos la memoria social (English edition: The Struggle for the Past. How We Construct Social Memories), Entangled Global Inequalities: Conceptual Debates and Evidence from Latin America (co-edited with Renata Motta and Sergio Costa), Podría ser yo. Los sectores populares en imagen y palabra (with Pablo Vila et. al., photographs by Alicia D’Amico. 2 volumes). 

In 2020 CLACSO published Las tramas del tiempo. Familia, género, memorias, derechos y movimientos sociales. Antología esencial (edited by Marcela Cerrutti, Ludmila Da Silva Catela and Sebastián Pereyra).

Gilbert Joseph, Yale University

Gilbert M. Joseph is the Farnam Professor Emeritus of History and International Studies at Yale University, where on several occasions he directed its Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies.  Before joining the Yale faculty in 1993, he received his PhD from Yale (1978) and taught for 16 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Professor Joseph is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on Mexican history, US-Mexican relations, and social and revolutionary movements in Latin America.  Most recently he has edited and contributed to several volumes treating Latin America’s involvement and distinct role in the global Cold War, which in many respects serve as background for the current collaborative project involving Yale, Fairfield, the University of North Florida, and a variety of institutions and scholars throughout the hemisphere.  In 2015-2016, he served as President of the Latin American Studies Association and presided over its Fiftieth Anniversary Congress.

Priya Lal, Boston College

Polly Lauer, University of Montana

Dr. Polly Lauer is an assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana in Missoula, MT. She partners with Indigenous media makers in Latin America, undertaking collaborative research to understand how Indigenous journalists respond to and overcome crisis. Her first book project, Struggling for Air: The Politics of Resilience in a Maya K’iche’ Radio Station, 1962-2020, documents the history of the first and longest-operating Maya K’iche’ radio station in Guatemala. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University and was previously a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University.

Adrián Lerner, Cambridge University

Paul Joseph López Oro, Bryn Mawr College

Paul Joseph López Oro is a third-generation Brooklynite by way of the Caribbean Coast of Honduras. As a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, their research and teaching focuses on Black Latin American & U.S. AfroLatinx social movements, Black Queer Feminist theories & ethnographies, and intersectional politics of hemispheric Blackness. His writings are available in Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism, NACLA Report on the Americas, Postmoden Culture, Transforming Anthropology, and numerous edited volumes. His book Indigenous Blackness: The Queer World-Making Politics of Garifuna Nueva York (Columbia University Press) is a critical ethnographic study on how transgenerationally Garifuna New Yorkers of Caribbean Central American descent queerly world-make their Black Indigeneity in New York City and its diasporas vis-a-vis ancestral memory, public performances, and digital/media spaces. He is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College.

Aldo Marchesi, Universidad de la República

Aldo Marchesi holds a Ph.D. in History from New York University (NYU). He is a Full Professor in the Department of Theory and Historiography at the Institute of History and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Uruguayan Studies (CEIU) (FHCE). He recently co-founded, along with colleagues from other disciplines, the Institute for Research on Social Justice and Inequality. He is a member of the National System of Researchers (Level II). He has served as a visiting professor at universities and research centers in the United States, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and China. His work has focused on the recent history of Uruguay and the Southern Cone. He has published numerous articles and books. His first work was *El Uruguay Inventado: Audiovisual Policy During the Dictatorship* (2001), which was reissued in 2023. His most recent book, a regional history of the armed left in the Southern Cone, was published in English (2018) and in Spanish (2019) under the title *Hacer la revolución*. As part of this line of research, he also co-authored a book on the left with Vania Markarian and Gerardo Caetano for the series *History of Political Parties in Uruguay* in 2021. He has continued to research the Latin American left in the 20th century and Uruguay’s recent history; since 2023, he has co-directed the Study Group on the Left (CSIC) with Diego Sempol. In 2025, he published *Time Does Not Stand Still: History, Crisis, and Future for Conceiving Leftist Projects* with Vania Markarian. He is currently finishing *A Brief History of the Latin American Left* for El Colegio de México. He has also served as editor and co-editor of several volumes. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of *Revista Contemporánea* and *The Global Sixties*. His current research project is an Intellectual and Political History of the Idea of Poverty in Contemporary Uruguay (1943–2010). As part of this project, he was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during 2019. He is currently the Tinker Visiting Professor at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin.

Gladys McCormick, Syracuse University

Gladys McCormick is Professor of History and the Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-US Relations at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She has held a number of administrative roles, currently serving as Associate Dean for Academic Initiatives and Curriculum. Until recently, she served as a six-year term as a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Among her publications is "The Last Door: A History of Torture in Mexico's War Against Subversives” (University of California Press, 2025), which was awarded 2026 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association. Her research focuses on political violence, security and organized crime, economic development, and oral history in modern and contemporary Mexico.

Mary Nolan, New York University

Mary Nolan works on twentieth-century European-American relations and the transatlantic Cold War, on German History, and most recently on social and economic human rights in the age of neoliberalism and on the gender politics of right radical populist movements. She is the author of America’s Century in Europe: Reflections on Americanization, Anti-Americanism and the Transatlantic Partnership (2023); The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (2012), Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (1995) and Social Democracy and Society: Working-class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890-1920 (1981). She is co-editor of Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (2002) and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018).

Julia Preston, Journalist and author

Julia Preston is a journalist focusing on immigration. From 2017 through 2024, she was a Contributing Writer at The Marshall Project, a non-profit journalism organization reporting on criminal justice and immigration. Before joining The Marshall Project, she worked for 21 years at The New York Times. She was the national correspondent covering immigration from 2006 through 2016, and a foreign correspondent in Mexico from 1995 through 2001, among other assignments. She was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post from 1985 to 1995, covering conflicts in Central America among other postings. She is a 2020 winner of an Online Journalism Award for Explanatory Reporting, for a Marshall Project series on myths about immigration and crime. She won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for a series by four New York Times reporters on drug corruption in Mexico. She was awarded the 1997 Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America. She is the author, with Samuel Dillon, of Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy, 2004, which recounts Mexico’s transformation from an authoritarian state into a struggling democracy.

Anthony Rossodivito, Coastal Carolina University

Anthony M. Rossodivito is currently serving as a Lecturer in the Department of History at Coastal Carolina University. His research centers on modern Cuba and the Cuban Revolution, guerrilla movements and insurgencies across Latin America and the Puerto Rican struggle for independence. His other research interests include solidarity networks across the Global South, the International Cold War. Having recently earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a dissertation titled “Routes of Victory: The 1959 Freedom Caravan, Memory, and Mobilization in the Cuban Revolution,” which examines the initial phase of Fidel Castro’s ascent to power in January 1959. He has received the Mellon Summer Research Grant and the Tinker Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Travel Grant and has presented at various academic conferences, with an upcoming publication on the sensory experience of the 1959 entry of the Cuban Rebel Army into Havana.

Felix Santiago-Martínez, Yale University

Felix Santiago-Martinez is a Ph.D. student in Modern Latin American History. His research focuses on histories of Latin America’s Cold War, U.S.-Latin American relations and Political History. He is currently exploring the influence of Tricontinentalism on Latin America’s Revolutionary Left in the 1960s and 1970s.

More widely, Felix is also interested in histories of gender & sexuality, empire and development. Before attending Yale, he completed a Master’s in History at New York University and a Master’s in Economics at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus, respectively.

Marian Schlotterbeck, University of California, Davis

Christy Thornton, New York University

Christy Thornton is an Associate Professor of History at New York University, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is also the co-director of the History and Political Economy Project. Before coming to NYU, she earned tenure in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, where she was also the Co-Chair of the JHU Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies. She is the author of Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association.

Eline van Ommen, University of Leeds

Eline van Ommen is Associate Professor in International History at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on revolutions, transnational activism, and the Cold War in Latin America, with particular expertise in Central America. She is the author of Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2024), which received the 2025 LASA Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award. Van Ommen has co-edited two special issues on the international and transnational dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution: one for The Americas (2021, with Tanya Harmer) and another for Cold War History (2026, with William Michael Schmidli). She is currently developing a new research project on the Central American peace process. Together with Molly Avery, she is also pursuing a project that examines the transformation of solidarity activism at the end of the Cold War.

Alejandro Velasco, New York University

Alejandro Velasco is Associate Professor of Latin American History at New York University, and Associate Dean of Faculty at the NYU Gallatin School. He was Executive Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas from 2015 to 2021. An expert on Venezuela's modern history, especially social movements, urban politics, and democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries, he is the author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela, which won the 2016 Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book on Venezuela awarded by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association. His research has received support from the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and others. A frequent media contributor, his editorials and analysis have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, NACLA, Nueva Sociedad, BBC Mundo, In These Times, The Washington Post, Current History, BBC History Magazine, and others. Velasco also frequently contributes radio and television commentary in outlets including NPR, MSNBC/MS Now, Al Jazeera, NBC, CBS, France 24, the BBC, Spectrum News, and the CBC, and to podcasts including Throughline, The Dig, Planet Money, Reveal, Search Engine, On with Kara Swisher, and others.

Louise Walker, Northeastern University

J. T. Way, Georgia State University

J. T. Way is a Professor of Latin American History at Georgia State University and a Latin American historian whose work focuses on Guatemala. He is the author of The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2012) and Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala (University of California Press, 2021). His current research focuses on the root causes of asylum-seeking in Northern Central America.

Meg Weeks, University of Florida

Meg Weeks is an assistant professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Currently, she is a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her first book, From the House to the Street: Sex Workers and Domestic Laborers in Brazil’s Democratic Transition, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2027.

Barbara Weinstein, New York University

Barbara Weinstein is Silver Professor of History at New York University and Past President of the American Historical Association. Her research focuses on postcolonial Latin America, and especially Brazil. Her publications include The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (1983), For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964 (1996), and The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (2015).  She has received funding for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is a former editor of International Labor and Working-Class History and the Hispanic American Historical Review, and is currently writing an intellectual biography of the pioneering Latin Americanist and criminologist Frank Tannenbaum.