Rate My Professor Diana Sierra Becerra

Diana Sierra Becerra is an Assistant Professor of History in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A historian of women and gender in Latin America who specializes in social movements and revolutions, she earned her PhD in History and Women's Studies from the University of Michigan in 2017, with a dissertation titled “Insurgent Butterflies: Gender and Revolution in El Salvador, 1965–2015.” Her research examines peasant and working-class women's roles in revolutionary processes, particularly in El Salvador. Her book, The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in El Salvador (Cambridge University Press, 2025), covers five decades of struggle from 1965 to 2015, weaving oral histories with archival sources to demonstrate how rank-and-file women shaped revolutions by confronting sexism within radical movements and developing revolutionary feminism that bridged socialism and women's liberation.

Sierra Becerra's scholarship extends to public history, including curating exhibitions at El Salvador’s Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, producing a TedEd animation on Radio Venceremos (2022), and coordinating the “We Make History” project with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which received the 2022 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History. As popular education coordinator, she developed a 17-workshop curriculum, trained domestic worker leaders as historians, and translated materials into multiple languages. Her key publications include “Harvesting Hope: Building Worker Power at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center” (Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 2020), “For Our Total Emancipation: The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in Insurgent El Salvador, 1977-1987” in Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left (Cambridge University Press, 2019), “The First Black Miss Colombia and the Limits of Multiculturalism” (Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2017), “Historical Memory at El Salvador’s Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen” (Latin American Perspectives, 2016), and co-authored articles such as “Hillary Clinton and Corporate Feminism” (Against the Current, 2015). In 2025, she received the College Outstanding Teaching Award from UMass Amherst’s College of Humanities and Fine Arts. Her pedagogy uses history to address contemporary injustices.