Kirsten Weld

Kirsten Weld

Professor of History
Weld Photo

Office Hours: Wednesdays 3-5pm, and by appointment

Kirsten Weld is a historian of modern Latin America. Her research explores 20th-century struggles over inequality, justice, historical memory, and social inclusion.

Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014), analyzes how history is produced as social knowledge, the labour behind transformative social change, and the stakes of the stories we tell about the past. It is a historical and ethnographic study of the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country's civil war, concealed from the truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the war’s end, stumbled upon by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. Paper Cadavers won the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award and the 2016 Best Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section.

Weld is currently writing her second book, Ruins and Glory: The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America, which examines the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War in the Americas from the 1930s through the present.

Born and raised in Canada, Weld holds a BA from McGill University and a PhD from Yale University. At Harvard, she offers courses in modern Latin American history, US-Latin American relations, archival theory, and historical methods.

Selected Publications

“No Democracy Without Archives,” Boston Review (9 July 2020)

“Holy War: Latin America’s Far Right,” Dissent Magazine (Spring 2020)

“The Other Door: Spain and the Guatemalan Counterrevolution, 1944-54,” Journal of Latin American Studies 51:2 (2019), 307-331.

“The Spanish Civil War and the Construction of a Reactionary Historical Consciousness in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile,” Hispanic American Historical Review 98:1 (Feb. 2018), 77-115.

“Archivos como armamentos en la guerra fría guatemalteca,” in Roberto García Ferreira and Arturo Taracena Arriola, eds., Guerra fría y anticomunismo en Centroamérica (Guatemala City: FLACSO, 2017).

Cadáveres de papel: Los archivos de la dictadura en Guatemala (Guatemala City: AVANCSO, 2017).

“Fighting Guatemala’s Archive Wars: Documentation, Mobilization, Justice,” in Carlos Aguirre and Javier Villa-Flores, eds., From the Ashes of History: Loss and Recovery in Archives and Libraries in Modern Latin America (Raleigh: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2015), 227-264.


“Washington’s Prying Eyes: The NSA Disclosures, Latin American Backlash, and What it Means for Hemispheric Relations,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Winter 2015.

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014)

“How the U.S. Institutionalized Surveillance: Washington’s Global Intelligence Network Began with the Humble File Card,” Al Jazeera America, 24 May 2014

Because They Were Taken Alive: Forced Disappearance in Latin America,” Revista: Harvard Review on Latin America, Fall 2013


“A Chance at Justice in Guatemala,” The New York Times, 4 February 2013

“Dignifying the Guerrillero, Not the Assassin: Rewriting a History of Criminal Subversion in Postwar Guatemala,” Radical History Review 113, Spring 2012 (awarded Best Article Prize by the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section)

 

 

Contact Information

CGIS South Building
1730 Cambridge Street
Room 419
Cambridge, MA 02138
p: 617-496-4360

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