Participant Biographies
Meet the distinguished scholars and practitioners who will come together at Yale and Fairfield to examine the Cold War’s lasting legacies and its continuing impact on Latin America.
Jennifer Adair, Fairfield University
Jennifer Adair is an Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University specializing in Latin American transitions from authoritarian rule, the history of human rights, and the end of the Cold War in Latin America. She is the author of In Search of the Lost Decade: Everyday Rights in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (University of California Press, 2020) and 1983: Un proyecto inconcluso (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2023). Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Hays, ACLS, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled, “Relaciones Carnales: Argentina, the US, and the Rise and Fall of the Washington Consensus.”
Juan Arboleda, Johns Hopkins University
Juan Ignacio Arboleda is a historian of modern Latin America, with a particular focus on Colombia and Brazil. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and holds a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.
His research explores the social and cultural history of constitutionalism, addressing questions of democracy, violence, inequality, popular political culture, and political participation. He is also interested in the relationship between technology and democracy, particularly how computers and early digital networks shaped processes of political participation in Latin America.
His current book project examines how widespread popular participation shaped constitution-making in Brazil and Colombia at the end of the Cold War, revealing how ordinary citizens sought to reimagine democracy and rebuild the state from below.
Claudio Barrientos, Universidad Diego Portales
Claudio Barrientos is an Associate Professor at the School of History of the Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago, Chile), Director of the Observatory of Recent History of Chile and Latin America, and Associate Editor (History) for the Latin American Research Review (LARR). He received his PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include memory studies, gender, and Indigenous communities. He is currently developing research in Gay and LGBTQ history. His recent publications include “Entre la revolución y la dictadura. Hostigamiento policial y violencia contra diversidades sexo-genéricas en Chile, 1960-1990 (Revista Iberoamericana, 2025); “Una ciudad para las alitas rotas,” in Víctor Hugo Robles, ed., Las viudas odiosas de Lemebel (Ediciones Siempreviva, 2024); “Más allá de la homofobia: violencias y políticas de hostigamiento policial a personas LGBTQ+ en Chile, 1990-2001,” in Luciano Saez and Nicolás Acevedo, eds, Mientras llega la alegría". Transición inconclusa en las relaciones cívico policiales (Editorial Tesis XII, 2023); and “Sangre disidente: represión, violencias de género y Vih/Sida en el Chile dictatorial, 1973-1990,” in Rafael Cáceres Feria and Diego Sempol, eds., Disidencias sexuales y de género en las dictaduras ibéricas y del Cono Sur. Entre la represión y las resistencias (Editorial Tirant lo Blanch, 2023).
Alison Bruey, University of North Florida
Alison J. Bruey is a Professor of History at the University of North Florida and a historian of modern Latin America. She is the author of Bread, Justice, and Liberty: Grassroots Activism and Human Rights in Pinochet's Chile (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) or Justicia y libertad: Luchas populares por los derechos sociales y democracia en Chile (LOM Ediciones, 2023). Bread, Justice, and Liberty won the Alfred B. Thomas Book Award from the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies and the Latin American Studies Association Southern Cone Studies Section Social Science Book Prize. She is the author of articles on neoliberalism, human rights, and grassroots activism in journals including the Journal of Latin American Studies, Radical Americas, the Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Social History. She is currently working on book projects titled “At World’s End: The Politics of Disaster on the Eve of World War,” and “Lost in Transition: Political Violence and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Latin America”
Carlos Fernando Chamorro, Journalist
Carlos Fernando Chamorro, periodista nicaragüense. Reportero y miembro del Consejo Editorial del diario La Prensa (1978-1979) Participó en la revolución que derrocó a la dictadura de Somoza (1979) y fue miembro del Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (1978-1994). Viceministro de Cultura, Gobierno de Reconstrucción Nacional (1979) Director de Barricada, periódico del Frente Sandinista (1980-1994) Fundador y Director del medio independiente Confidencial y del programa de televisión Esta Semana (1995-1996). La redacción de Confidencial fue asaltada por la Policía de la dictadura de Nicaragua (2018 y 2021), y el medio de comunicación fue ilegalmente confiscado. Exiliado en Costa Rica desde 2021, fue despojado de su ciudadanía nicaragüense por el régimen Ortega Murillo en 2023. Licenciado en Economía por la Universidad de McGill (1977), Knight Fellow en la Universidad de Stanford (1997-1998). Premio María Moors Cabot de la Escuela de Periodismo de la Universidad de Columbia (2010); Premio Ortega y Gasset del diario El País, a la trayectoria profesional (2021); Pluma de Oro de la Libertad (WAN-IFRA) (2024). Miembro del Consejo Rector de la Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Gabo para el nuevo periodismo iberoamericano.
Carlos Fernando Chamorro is a Nicaraguan journalist. He was a reporter and member of the editorial board of La Prensa (1978-1979). He participated in the revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and was a member of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) from 1978 to 1994. He served as Vice-Minister of Culture in the Gobierno de Reconstrucción Nacional (1979), director of the FSLN’s newspaper, Barricada (1980-1994), and was the founder and director of the television program Esta Semana (1995-1996) and the independent media outlet Confidencial. In 2018 and 2021, the Nicaraguan dictatorship’s police assaulted the editorial offices of Confidencial, and the media outlet was illegally confiscated. In 2021, Chamorro went into exile in Costa Rica. In 2023, the Ortega-Murillo regime stripped Chamorro of his Nicaraguan citizenship. Chamorro holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from McGill University (1977) and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University (1997-1998). He has been awarded the Columbia University Journalism School’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize (2010); the El País Ortega y Gasset Prize for professional trajectory (2021); and the Pluma de Oro de la Libertad (WAN-IFRA) (2024). He currently serves on the governing council of the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Gabo for new Iberoamerican journalism.
Michelle Chase, Pace University
Michelle Chase is an Associate Professor at Pace University and a historian of modern Latin America specializing in twentieth-century Cuba. Her first book, Revolution within the Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), studied the role of women and gender in the Cuban Revolution. Her co-edited book, The Cuban Revolution and the New Left (University of Florida Press, 2026), examines the Cuban Revolution's global impact on ideas of gender, sexuality, and family. She is currently completing a transnational study of anti-Castro activism in the global Cold War.
Isabella Cosse, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Universidad Nacional de San Martín
Isabella Cosse is a principal researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Among other books, she is the author of Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America’s Global Comic (Duke University Press, 2019), Pareja, sexualidad y familia en los años sesenta (Siglo XXI, 2010), Estigmas de Nacimiento. Peronismo y orden familiar (FCE, 2006), Rotos corazones. Amor y política en los años setenta (Siglo XXI, 2025), and co-editor, with Michelle Chase, of The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family (University of Florida Press, 2026).
Monica DeHart, University of Puget Sound
Monica DeHart is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puget Sound, where she also directs the Global Development Studies and Latin American Studies programs. Her ethnographic research examines the cultural politics of China-Latin America relations, focusing on how transpacific connections manifest on the ground in Central America. Her most recent book, Transpacific Developments: The Politics of Multiple Chinas in Central America (Cornell University Press, 2021), explored Chinese development initiatives in the region to illuminate how local actors perceive and navigate relationships with multiple forms of China and Chineseness in the realms of infrastructure, trade, and corruption. Her current research, for which she received a 2025 ACLS Project Development grant, investigates regional development, diaspora community politicization, and the localization of transpacific exchanges at the municipal level in Guatemala and Costa Rica. Her earlier work, Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Identity and Development Politics in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2010), examined ethnodevelopment initiatives in Latin America and Latinx communities in the US. She has served as an executive board member and co-chair of the Asia & the Americas section of the Latin American Studies Association.
Ponciano Del Pino Huamán, Universidad Diego Portales
Ponciano Del Pino Huamán is an Associate Professor at the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. He holds a degree in History from the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga (Ayacucho, Peru) and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His areas of interest include contemporary Peruvian and Latin American history; memory and political violence; and the political culture of indigenous communities in the process of Peruvian state formation and transformation. His publications include, En nombre del gobierno. Uchuraccay y el Perú: un siglo de política campesina (La Siniestra Ensayos, 2017), which received the 2018 Ibero-American Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association; and ¿Un museo después de Gaza? Dilemas sobre la memoria, co-edited with José Carlos Agüero (La Siniestra Ensayos, 2026). He is currently writing a book on war, everyday life, and social order during the Shining Path insurgency.
Mariana Díaz Chalela, Boston University
Mariana Díaz Chalela is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. She is a historian of modern Latin America interested in the relationship between economic development and political violence, property rights, and transitional justice. Her first book project traces the political and social history of agricultural credit in Colombia from the Great Depression through the height of the Cold War. The book connects the histories of international development and foreign debt to the everyday politics of rural life in Latin America. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Tinker Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the John Rovensky Fellowship in Business and Economic History, the George W. Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy, and the MacMillan Center in International and Area Studies. She also collaborates with an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners to rethink issues of memory and repair, particularly in the context of human rights and transitional justice archives in Latin America. Prior to becoming a historian, she worked as a lawyer in Colombia and continues to explore the intersections between law and history. She received her PhD in History from Yale University and holds an LLB (JD equivalent) and an MA in History from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.
Marcela Echeverri, Yale University
Marcela Echeverri is Associate Professor of Latin American history at Yale University. She is currently at work on a global history of Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America (1971).
Seth Fein, Seven Local Film
Seth Fein is a historian and documentarian who operates Seven Local Film in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he lives. His recent films include the shorts Daddy’s Boys, Small Kitchens, and The Actor in his Labyrinth as well as the feature-length Between Neighborhoods, which will be screened at the “No End in Sight” conference. He has written extensively about the transnational and international histories of film between Mexico and the United States across the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. He did his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and has taught film and history at various universities, including Yale (History) and Brooklyn College's Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.
Greg Grandin, Yale University
Greg Grandin is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, most recently, America, América: A New History of the New World. Other books include The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America which won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the prize in History, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic, revised and expanded in 2021, and Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. He is also the author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Grandin is also the author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America During the Cold War and The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for the best book published on Latin America in any discipline. With Gil Joseph, Grandin co-edited A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War.
Alma Guillermoprieto, Journalist, author
Alma Guillermoprieto, a native of Mexico, writes frequently about Latin America for The New Yorkerand The New York Review of Books. She began her reporting career in 1978, covering the conflicts in Central America for The Guardian and subsequently for The Washington Post. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a 2010 IWMF Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018 she received the Princess of Asturias Humanities Award in Oviedo, Spain. Her first book, Samba (Knopf, 1990), an account of the year she spent with carnival-makers in Rio de Janeiro, was nominated for the 1990 National Book Critics Circle award. Two subsequent collections of her essays for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, The Heart that Bleeds (Knopf, 1994), and Looking for History(Pantheon, 2001), are now considered classic accounts of Latin America during an era of turmoil and change. A fourth book, Dancing with Cuba (Pantheon, 2004), is an account of the time she spent teaching modern dance in Havana in 1970, a crucial year for the Cuban revolution. Alma Guillermoprieto lives in Bogota, Colombia.
Steve Hahn, New York University
Steve Hahn received his BA at the University of Rochester, his MA and PhD at Yale University, and is currently a 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 and Political Science
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). Her other publications include two edited volumes, Chile y la Guerra fría global, with Alfredo Riquelme (2014) and Towards a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left with Alberto Martín Álvarez (2021). She is currently working on a history of Chilean and Uruguayan exiles in Cuba and their return at the end of the Cold War.
Rebecca Herman, University of California-Berkeley
Rebecca Herman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California-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 an Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Master of Arts 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 BA from Grinnell College and a PhD from Harvard University.
Elizabeth Jelin, National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) at the Institute of Economic and Social Development (CIS-IDES)
Elizabeth Jelin is a Senior Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) at the Institute of Economic and Social Development (CIS-IDES) in Buenos Aires, and a Fellow of the International Science Council. She is an Argentine social scientist engaged in research on social inequalities, human rights, gender and the family, social movements, and memories of political repression. Her publications include Los trabajos de la memoria (editorial, date) or State Repression and the Labors of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); La lucha por el pasado. Cómo construimos la memoria social (editorial, date) or The Struggle for the Past. How We Construct Social Memories (editorial, date); Entangled Global Inequalities: Conceptual Debates and Evidence from Latin America (co-edited with Renata Motta and Sergio Costa); and Podría ser yo. Los sectores populares en imagen y palabra (two volumes, with Pablo Vila et. al., photographs by Alicia D’Amico); and Las tramas del tiempo. Familia, género, memorias, derechos y movimientos sociales. Antología esencial (edited by Marcela Cerrutti, Ludmila Da Silva Catela and Sebastián Pereyra, CLACSO, 2020).
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 fifteen years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He 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 co-edited and contributed to several volumes treating Latin America’s involvement and distinct role in the global Cold War, which in certain respects serve as background for the current collaborative project. From 1997-2002, he edited (with Stuart Schwartz) the Hispanic American Historical Review. In 2015-2016, he served as President of the Latin American Studies Association and presided over its Fiftieth Anniversary Congress.
Priya Lal, Boston College
Priya Lal is an Associate Professor of History at Boston College. Her second book, Ambition and Adjustment: The Making and Unmaking of Postcolonial Development in Africa, will be published by the University of Chicago press in December 2026. She is also the author of African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.
Polly Lauer, University of Montana
Polly Lauer is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. 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 PhD in History from Yale University and was a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University.
Adrián Lerner, University of Cambridge
Adrián Lerner is University Assistant Professor of Latin American History at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of Peterhouse. He is a finishing a book about the urbanization of the Amazon rainforest. His most recent book is a two-volume collection of essays titled "Global Peru" (Crítica), coedited with Alberto Vergara. He obtained his BA from Perú's Universidad Católica and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale. Before moving to Cambridge, he worked at Princeton and the Free University of Berlin.
Paul Joseph López Oro, Bryn Mawr College
Paul Joseph López Oro is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Bryn Mawr College and 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, Postmodern Culture, Transforming Anthropology, and numerous edited volumes. His book Indigenous Blackness: The Queer World-Making Politics of Garifuna Nueva York (Columbia University Press, forthcoming) 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.
Aldo Marchesi, Universidad de la República
Aldo Marchesi holds a PhD in History from New York University. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Theory and Historiography at the Institute of History, Universidad de la República (Uruguay), 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 focuses on the recent history of Uruguay and the Southern Cone. He has published numerous books, including El Uruguay Inventado: Audiovisual Policy During the Dictatorship (2001, reissued in 2023), and Latin America's Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s (2018) or Hacer la revolución (2019). In 2021, he co-authored a book on the left with Vania Markarian and Gerardo Caetano for the series History of Political Parties in Uruguay. 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 a Professor of History and the Jay and Debe Moskowitz Endowed Chair in Mexico-US Relations at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. She has held a number of administrative roles, currently serving as Associate Dean for Academic Initiatives and Curriculum. Until recently, she served 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 is a Professor of History Emerita at New York University. She 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 (Wallstein Verlag, 2023); The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Social Democracy and Society: Working-class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 1981). She is co-editor of Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (The New Press, 2002) and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (Routledge, 2018).
Julia Preston, Journalist, 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 twenty-one 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 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), which recounts Mexico’s transformation from an authoritarian state into a struggling democracy.
Anthony Rossodivito, Coastal Carolina University
Anthony M. Rossodivito is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Coastal Carolina University. He holds a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research centers on modern Cuba and the Cuban Revolution, guerrilla movements and insurgencies across Latin America, and the Puerto Rican struggle for independence. Additional research interests include solidarity networks across the Global South and the international Cold War. His research has been supported by a Mellon Summer Research Grant and the Tinker Pre-Dissertation Summer Research Travel Grant. His current projects include the book manuscript “Routes of Victory: The 1959 Freedom Caravan, Memory, and Mobilization in the Cuban Revolution," an article on the sensory experience of the 1959 entry of the Cuban Rebel Army into Havana, and the construction of revolutionary identity and historical memory in post-Cold War Cuba.
Felix Santiago-Martínez, Yale University
Felix Santiago-Martinez is a PhD student in Modern Latin American History at Yale University. 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. His broader research interests include histories of gender and sexuality, empire, and development. Before attending Yale, he completed an MA in History at New York University and an MA in Economics at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus.
Marian Schlotterbeck, University of California-Davis
Marian Schlotterbeck is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis and a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in 20th-century Chile. Her first book, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile (University of California Press, 2018) or Más allá de la Vanguardia: Los revolucionarios de base en el Chile de Allende (LOM Ediciones, 2026) is about radical politics in the decade before the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. She is currently completing a second book, Making Neoliberal Citizens, which examines the Chilean civilian-military dictatorship through the lens of childhood.
Christy Thornton, New York University
Christy Thornton is an Associate Professor of History at New York University and 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 co-chaired 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 an 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 an 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 (University of California Press, 2015), 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
Louise E. Walker is Professor of History at Northeastern University. Her new book, Debts Unpaid: Two Centuries of Trouble and Conflict in Mexico’s Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2026) draws on 1,500 conflicts to show how power struggles between debtors and creditors shaped economic transformation in Mexico from 1808 to 2008. She is author of the award-winning Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968 (2013), and also editor of Latin America’s Middle Class (2012, coedited with David Parker), and the Journal Dossier “Spy Reports: Content, Methodology and Historiography in Mexico’s Secret Police Archive” (2013, coedited with Tanalís Padilla). Her research is supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Cambridge, and the American Academy in Berlin. She earned her PhD from Yale University and her BA from McGill University.
J. T. Way, Georgia State University
J. T. Way is a Professor of Latin American History at Georgia State University and an historian of Latin America 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 (Stanford University Press,1983), For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), and The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Duke University Press, 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. She is currently writing an intellectual biography of the pioneering Latin Americanist and criminologist Frank Tannenbaum.