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This event will be hybrid. To join for the virtual session, click here.
Speaker: Betsy Konefal, Associate Professor of History, William & Mary; DRCLAS Central American Visiting Scholar
Moderated by: Erin Goodman, Director of the Weatherhead Scholars Program, Harvard University
Photo by H.I.J.O.S.-Guatemala: “No es nostalgia ... es la memoria de la posibilidad” [It’s not nostalgia… it’s the memory of possibility.]
Betsy Konefal is an Associate Professor of History at William & Mary and author of For Every Indio Who Falls: A History of Maya Activism in Guatemala, which chronicles highland mobilization in a context of revolutionary insurgency and genocidal counterinsurgency in the 1970s and 1980s. She’s currently working on a book on progressive Catholicism in that country in the 1960s, which focuses on nuns and priests, their students, and rural Guatemalans with whom they worked, and follows trajectories as some opted for revolutionary mobilization. Konefal has authored articles in journals including the Hispanic American Historical Review, Peace Studies Journal, Social Justice, and Humanity, and has published in edited volumes on Liberation Theology; Latin American social movements; gender, ethnicity and revolution; and historical memory.
Erin Goodman directs the Scholars Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Prior to joining the Weatherhead Center in spring 2021, she coordinated research initiatives at the Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad (CASA), and worked at Harvard for 15 years, most recently as associate director for academic programs at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (2014–2018). Erin is the co-editor of three volumes centered on historical and collective memory, including Reflections on Memory and Democracy with Merilee S. Grindle (Harvard University Press, 2016). She earned an EdM in International Education Policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA in International Relations at Wellesley College.