Marian Schlotterbeck
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History. My dissertation, “Everyday Revolution: Grassroots Movements and the Making of Socialism in Chile, 1960 -1973,” explores the struggles of anonymous activists in Concepción to build a more democratic society. The southern Chilean province of Concepción, home to students, steelworkers, and coal miners, has a unique history of political activism that cuts across political regimes and world regions. In the 1960s and 1970s, Concepción boasted some of the most radical political and social movements in the country. In mapping the trajectories of local leaders and everyday people, I will ask: How was this revolution lived? What did socialism mean for those individuals who so fervently believed in its potential? How are these experiences remembered decades later? In telling the story of how workers and students converged in Concepción, my dissertation will disclose the everyday revolutionary interactions through which Chileans sought to remake relationships of power and carve out local spaces of meaning.
My dissertation committee includes Gil Joseph (chair), Peter Winn (Tufts University), Michael Denning (American Studies), and Lillian Guerra (University of Florida).
In 2010-2011 I will carry out archival research and oral history interviews in Chile thanks to funding from the Social Science Research Council IDRF and the Fulbright-Hays DDRA. I have affiliations with the Universidad de Santiago to work with Dr. Mario Garcés and with the Universidad de Concepción where I will continue studying with Dr. Alejandra Brito Peña. Summer research trips to Chile in 2008 and 2009 were made possible with support from the Tinker Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s MacMillan Center and the Cobb Fellowship.
My examination fields were Modern Latin America (Gil Joseph), Colonial Latin America (Stuart Schwartz) and Caribbean History (Lillian Guerra). I have served as a Teaching Fellow for Colonial Latin America and the History of Cuba and Puerto Rico.
My publications include "Gender, Order, and Femicide: Reading the Popular Culture of Murder in Ciudad Juárez," co-authored with my undergraduate mentor, Steven Volk, in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies (Spring 2007). This essay based on my Oberlin College honors thesis has since been reprinted in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade and La Frontera (University of Texas Press, 2010) and The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970-2010 (second edition UCLA Press, 2011). My work has also appeared in The Nation.
Born and raised in Indiana, I earned a B.A. in History and Latin American Studies in 2005 from Oberlin College. After graduation, I worked as an intern for the Chile and Cuba Documentation Projects at the non-profit National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. I spent 2006 as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar at the Universidad de Concepción in Chile, where I studied sociology and history. My interest in the local experiences of the Popular Unity period in Chile developed out of a seminar on regional history and the interviews I conducted with former union leaders from the coal mining communities of Lota and Coronel. In February 2007, I returned to work with Peter Kornbluh at the National Security Archive as a Research Associate before beginning my coursework at Yale in Fall 2007.
Please feel free to email me with any questions about graduate history study at Yale.
