About Historias
Historias is a podcast dedicated to promoting and facilitating conversations among scholars of Latin America, primarily across the Americas and Europe. The main goal is to help disseminate research published in English to Spanish-speaking audiences.
Each month, we host a conversation with one or more authors about their recent publications and/or research areas. These episodes might focus on a single monograph or involve multiple academics discussing and contextualizing critical current events.
Historias is a digital media project of the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies.
Meet the Current Team
Carmen Soliz, Producer and Host
Carmen Soliz is a Bolivian historian. She is an associate professor of Latin American history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Carmen completed an MA in Andean Studies at Universidad de la Cordillera (Bolivia) and another in Latin American Studies at Universidad de Salamanca (Spain). She received her Ph.D. in Latin American History from New York University in 2014. Her research examines Bolivian agrarian reform and sees the role that Indians and peasants played in the consolidation of one of the most radical and redistributive reforms in Latin America.
She is the author of the award winning book, Fields of Revolution:
Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), which explored the 1952 Bolivian Revolution and specifically the Revolution's land reform programs. Carmen has also published numerous articles, including in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin America, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and Revista Historia y Cultura.
Edward Brudney, Host
Edward Brudney is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He earned his Ph.D. in Latin American History from Indiana University in 2019. His research focuses on the intersections of labor organizing, changing modes of capital accumulation, and political legitimacy, primarily in late-twentieth-century Argentina. His current book project, Changing the Rules of the Game: Labor, Law, and Citizenship in Argentina 1973-1983, analyzes the creation and enforcement of labor law in Argentina during the 1970s and highlights the disconnect between the letter of the law and its practical applications, even (or especially) under authoritarianism.
Dr. Brudney's scholarship has appeared in various outlets, including the Journal of Global South Studies, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, the Oral History Review, and International Labor and Working-Class History.
Past Contributors
Steven Hyland, Co-Creator, Co-Editor-in-Chief, and Former Host
Steven is formerly an associate professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Wingate University and serves as the Secretary-Treasurer of SECOLAS.
He published his first book, More Argentine Than You: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants in Argentina, in 2017 with the University of New Mexico Press.
Lily Pearl Balloffet, Co-Creator and Former Host
Lily is an assistant professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies program at UC Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching focus on the topics of migration, social movements, and transnational history.
Her first book is titled Argentina in the Global Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2020). This project, like her other publications, examined the ways in which diverse regions of the Global South share links to global migration systems. Lily’s primary interest is in writing transregional histories as seen through the lens of South-South alliances, solidarities, and exchanges that we can trace back to their roots in a long history of movement.
Her next book, provisionally titled American Venom: What Snakes Tell Us about our Interconnected Hemisphere, proposes these venomous creatures as a natural fulcrum for investigating the movement of capital, bodies, and forms of knowledge in the Americas starting at the dawn of the 20th century.
Carlos Dimas, Co-Creator, Producer, and Former Host
Carlos is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in Latin American history.
His research and teaching interests are in the medical and environmental humanities, and the points in which they overlap within modern Latin America.
His current manuscript, The Poisoned Eden: Global Disease, Local Environments, and Cultural Change in Northwestern Argentina, 1865-1916, is a study of three cholera epidemics and their role in the formation in the Argentine state in rural Argentina. He has had work appear in the Journal of Latin American Studies and Bulletin of Latin American Research.
His next project will be in the areas of the history of science and technology, with a study on the development of meteorology in 19th century Argentina.
At present he is a 2019-2020 Residential Fellow at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering, and Technology in Kansas City, MO.
Dustin Walcher, Co-Editor-in-Chief and Former Host
Dustin Walcher is Professor and Chair of History & Political Science at Southern Oregon University. A specialist in international affairs, Latin American international history, and U.S. foreign relations, his scholarship analyzes international economic policy, global capitalism, social disruption, and political violence. With Jeffrey F. Taffet he published The United States and Latin America: A History with Documents (Routledge, 2017).
Dustin is currently revising a manuscript that examines the link between the failure of U.S.-led economic initiatives and the rise of social revolution in Argentina during the 1950s and 1960s.
Renata Keller, Former Host
Renata Keller is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, who focuses on the Cold War in Latin America and international history. Her first book, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015) was awarded SECOLAS’s Alfred B. Thomas Book Prize and honorable mentions for RMCLAS’s Thomas McGann and Michael C. Meyer Prizes.
Her second book, tentatively titled Nuclear Reactions: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Cold War in Latin America, is a hemispheric history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Her articles include pieces in The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Journal of Cold War Studies, The Latin American Research Review, Diplomatic History, and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and her research has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Philanthropic Educational Organization, the Kluge Center at the U.S. Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, and other institutions.
Jaclyn Sumner, Former Host
Jackie is an assistant professor of History at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. Her research explores the interactions between local, state, and national political actors in modern Mexico, as well as broader issues of race, development, and authoritarianism. Jackie is currently completing a monograph titled: Indigenous Autocracy: Race, Governance, and Power in Porfirian Tlaxcala, 1880-1915. The book explores the strategies that Governor Próspero Cahuantzi—a self-identified indigenous person and native of Tlaxcala—pursued in order to remain in power longer than any other governor during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). Her recent publication in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos explains how Governor Cahuantzi exploited his indigenous heritage to ingratiate himself to national Mexican elites. It is titled “The Indigenous Governor of Tlaxcala and Acceptable Indigenousness during the Porfirian Regime,” MS/EM (Winter, 2019).
David McLaughlin, Former Host
Dave is a Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Cincinnati. He serves as the representative for contingent faculty on the Executive Committee of SECOLAS and recently completed the Mellon Foundation/Five Colleges of Ohio Post Doctoral Fellowship in Portuguese and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He researches hip hop, popular music, citizenship, film, and literature, and makes a mean batch of chilaquiles.
Dave is also a contributor to Sounds and Colors, a website, print publication and record label dedicated to Latin American music and culture, with a particular focus on the South American countries
Giovanni Bello, Former Host
Giovanni Bello is a Bolivian historian. He holds an MA in Hispanic Literature from the University of Cincinnati and is currently a doctoral candidate in History at the Stony Brook University. His research focuses broadly on 20th Century Andean cultural history. He is particularly interested in avant-gardist and countercultural literature, popular music and intellectual networks.
Rebekah Ward, Production Editor
Rebekah is currently at the University of North Carolina Charlotte pursuing her MA in the Latin American Studies program and working as a graduate assistant for SECOLAS. She is the Production Editor for the Spanish episodes of Historias.
Rebekah graduated from the University of South Carolina in Spring 2021 with a BA in International Studies and a minor in Latin American Studies, where she was also a Carolina Global Scholar contributing to the Maxcy International Blog as a writer and as an intern to the Columbia World Affairs Council.
Max Mandell, Production Editor and Social Media Director
Max Mandell is the Production Editor and Social Media Director for the Historias podcast.
Based in Ashland, Max is a junior in the Emerging Media and Digital Arts (EMDA) program at Southern Oregon University (SOU). In addition to his EMDA major, Max is also pursuing an art minor and a certificate in SOU’s Trans Studies program. He is a member of the SOU Honors College, where he is currently spearheading the creation of the Honors College Trans fellowship.
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