I am reading for a DPhil in History at Corpus Christi College under the supervision of Professor Eduardo Posada-Carbó. My interests in history span the twentieth-century United States and Mexico, including transnational protests and revolutions, US foreign policy in Latin America, and the rise and fall of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico. I am mostly interested in how different iterations of US power influenced local regimes’ perceptions of order and progress, and how Cold War encounters with the Colossus of the North shaped the collective historical memory of the region.
My DPhil dissertation will trace how counterinsurgent violence and the turn to the Third World became two contradictory yet fully compatible pillars of PRI politics in the early 1970s. Through the lens of international history, I will show that the national politics of the PRI state was shaped by a combination of internal pressure to uphold the revolutionary legacy and solidarity, and external pressure from Washington to contain hemispheric Communism. By casting Mexico as one of the ‘empire's workshops’ (Grandin) where US power was often implicitly projected, I also intend to write a US imperial history from the outside in, through the eyes of those who cooperated and resisted.
Before coming to Oxford, I completed an MPhil in American History at the University of Cambridge (2022-2023) and a BA at the Institute of the Americas, UCL (2019-2022). In the summer of 2023, I also worked as a research assistant in the Institute of American Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in China.
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