Rate My Professor Kirsten Weld

Weld's first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014), is a historical and ethnographic study of the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police. These documents functioned as tools of state repression during the country's civil war, were concealed from the truth commission investigating crimes against humanity, discovered by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed for historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. The book 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; a Spanish edition was published by AVANCSO in 2017. She is completing her second book, Ruins and Glory: The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America (Harvard University Press, forthcoming), which traces the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War across the Americas from the 1930s to the present. Key articles include “The Other Door: Spain and the Guatemalan Counterrevolution, 1944-54” (Journal of Latin American Studies, 2019), “The Spanish Civil War and the Construction of a Reactionary Historical Consciousness in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile” (Hispanic American Historical Review, 2018), and the award-winning “Dignifying the Guerrillero, Not the Assassin: Rewriting a History of Criminal Subversion in Postwar Guatemala” (Radical History Review, 2012), which received the Best Article Prize from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section. Weld is on leave for the 2025-2026 academic year.