History Graduate Students

Profile

I study the history of Modern Latin America and Eastern Europe from a global and transnational perspective.   My main focus is on Brazil, Nicaragua and Poland in the Cold War period.

In my dissertation, “The Role of Latin American and Eastern European Catholics in the Transnationalization of Democratic Struggles in the 1970s and 1980s,” I trace the personal and public trajectories of a group of Brazilian, Nicaraguan and Polish Catholic intellectuals who took on theologically progressive, socially committed, and politically oppositional attitudes in the postwar period.  I focus, in particular, on the global conjuncture that enabled progressive Catholicism to go transnational.  During the 1970s and 1980s, the harsh national realities of dictatorships intersected, at the global level, with the successive easing up and intensification of Cold War tensions, and a parallel opening and closing within the Church.  In this context, progressive Catholic intellectuals already engaged in democratic struggles in their home countries increasingly came to join in transnational efforts. 

My broader interests include: social, political and intellectual history; oral history; the methodological issues involved in doing comparative, global and transnational history; social movements; and the Left.

My General Examination fields were: Modern Latin American History; Colonial Latin American History; and Global History, 1850-the present.   I completed a Joint Honors B.A. in History and Philosophy at McGill University in 2007.