Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice

Date: 

Thursday, November 14, 2019, 4:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S216

Speaker: Alan McPherson, Professor of History, Temple University

Moderator: Kirsten Weld, Professor of History, Harvard University

Historian Alan McPherson of Temple University will discuss his new book about the 1976 assassination of Chilean Orlando Letelier and U.S. citizen Ronni Moffitt, which took two decades to prosecute, transformed human rights, democracy, and counterterrorism in the United States and Chile, and helped end the Pinochet regime.

Alan McPherson is Freaney Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD) at Temple University. He is the author and editor of eleven books, including the prize-winning Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (Harvard, 2003) and The Invaded: How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (Oxford, 2014).

Kirsten Weld is a historian of modern Latin America. Her research explores 20th-century struggles over inequality, justice, historical memory, and social inclusion. Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014), analyzes how history is produced as social knowledge, the labour behind transformative social change, and the stakes of the stories we tell about the past. It is a historical and ethnographic study of the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country's civil war, concealed from the truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the war’s end, stumbled upon by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. Paper Cadavers 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.