Kirsten Weld is an historian of modern Latin America. Her research centers on the 20th-century history of political and ideological conflict in the Americas, particularly during the region's long Cold War, as well as on the politics of historical and archival knowledge production. 
 

Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014), is a broad meditation on how history is produced as social knowledge, on the labour behind transformative social change, and on the stakes of the stories we tell ourselves about the past. It is a historical and ethnographic study of the archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country's civil war, kept hidden from the truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the war’s conclusion, stumbled upon and rescued by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. Paper Cadavers was awarded the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award. 
 

Professor Weld's second book, now in progress, examines the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War in Latin America. Her other research and teaching interests include Latin America's relationships with the United States and Spain, the histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas, memory and post-conflict reckoning, and oral and ethnographic approaches to historical research. Born and raised in Canada, she holds a BA from McGill University and a PhD from Yale University, where her doctoral dissertation won both institutional and national awards. She taught at Brandeis University as the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Latin American History for two years before coming to Harvard, where she offers courses in modern Latin American history, US-Latin American relations, and historical methods. She has won research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the William F. Milton Fund.

Selected Publications

“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 Sección Historia Reciente y Memoria)