Dr. Kirsten Weld

Biography

Kirsten Weld is a historian specializing in modern Latin America. Her research focuses on 20th-century struggles for inequality, justice, historical memory, and social inclusion. Her book, Paper Cadavers: Archives of the Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014), analyzes the history produced by social knowledge and the labor involved in achieving transformative social change, particularly within the context of the stories told about the past. This historical ethnographic study explores the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were tools of state repression during the country's civil war. Weld examines how these archives concealed the truth presented to a truth commission established to investigate crimes against humanity at the war's end, as well as the challenges faced by justice activists in 2005 when these archives were repurposed for historical accounting during postwar reconstruction. She won the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award and the 2016 Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History Memory Section for this work. Currently, Weld is writing a book titled Ruins of Glory: The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America, which investigates the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War across the Americas from the 1930s to the present. She teaches courses on modern Latin American history, U.S.-Latin American relations, archival theory, and historical methods at Harvard University.

Research Interests