Denisa Jashari

Ph.D. Student

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American History at Indiana University, where I am finishing my dissertation, Cartographies of Conflict: Political Culture and Urban Protest in Chilean Shantytowns, 1872-1994. My dissertation combines critical geography, visual culture, and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping to illuminate the contested politics of the urban poor in Santiago, Chile. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, I argue that the spatial aspects of politics provide vital insights into the interplay between subjectivity and state power. My research interests include urban history, visual culture, social movements, the Cold War, and oral history and memory.

Chris Jillson

Ph.D. Student

As a historian of Central America, my research focuses on popular political movements, union organizing, and the effects of economic change in the 20th century. My dissertation focuses on the Frente Sandinista after their 1990 electoral defeat and attempts to organize the maquila sector of Nicaragua. I utilize oral history methodology to describe the experiences of women workers in the textile industry and attempts at collective organizing to resist exploitation during the worst ravages of economic restructuring. My research interests also include US interventions, neoliberalism, and tourism.

Casimir Enrrique Korducki

Ph.D. Student

My work focuses on Dominican political and social movements in the post-Trujillo era. I am interested in the ways local and national groups negotiated disparate and oftentimes contradictory political ideologies within a wider opposition movement to the regime of Joaquin Balaguer. This period saw the entrenchment of a system of state patronage by the nation’s traditional powerbrokers, thereby profoundly shaping the future of the Dominican political system. At its core, my project deals with the difficulties opposition organizations faced in attempting to instill democratic and liberatory values in an atmosphere of increased repression. This project considers peasant movements, national party politics, political violence, and US Cold War foreign policy.

Kathryn Lehman

Ph.D. Student

I am a historian of modern Latin America. My current research project is a labor and environmental history of Amazonian Bolivia and Brazil. I examine the intersection of rural worker organizing among rubber tappers and Brazil nut collectors and the natural environment in forest communities near the border of the two countries from 1945-2008.

Margarita Martínez-Osorio

Ph.D. Student

My research focuses on the intersections between gender and citizenship in rural Colombia during the 20th century. I am interested in studying how, upon the various attempts of agrarian reform that took place in Colombia during the last century, campesino (rural) women and men set up meanings and practices of citizenship, strongly informed by gender, that defined their relationship with the state, politics, and land. In this vein, my scholarly interests revolve around gender theories combined with class and rural analysis of Modern Latin America.

Nicolas Sillitti

Ph.D. Student

My dissertation examines the everyday lives of workers, peasants and immigrants’ children in the Argentine barracks from the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century. During that period, the country’s liberal reformers envisioned mandatory military conscription as a mechanism to infuse popular classes modern notions of patriotism, masculine respectability and, ultimately, to forge a “virile Argentine race”. My research challenges dominant interpretations claiming that Argentine state was successful in its effort to create a “uniformly white nation”. By closely analyzing popular books, photographs, folk songs and tales, my work illuminates the array of practices through which subaltern groups negotiated their belonging in the political community and reimagined their identities without abandoning previous cultural traditions.

Jon Warner

Ph.D. Student

Jon Warner received his BA in History and Spanish from St. Olaf College in Minnesota. He took a year off after graduating and spent 6 months in Costa Rica and Panama, alternating between living on the beach and on coffee farms. He is currently in his 6th year at IU and hopes to be done with a draft of his dissertation by the end of the summer. His research deals with the development of black internationalism among West Indians in Panama and the Panamanian political and social responses that developed as a result of West Indian black internationalism.

Amanda Waterhouse

Ph.D. Student

Amanda C. Waterhouse is a historian of United States foreign relations with specializations in Cold War Latin America, social movements, and cultural history. Her dissertation examines Colombian architecture, urban planning, and public works from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. She is interested in the transnational formulation and construction of the built environment, and especially in the role of U.S. planners, architects, bureaucrats, and philanthropic foundations in building a ‘modern’ world. Her research also explores political and social contestation in urban space, particularly through riots and university student activists in Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín.