Kirsten Weld

Kirsten Weld is Professor of History at Harvard University. A historian of modern Latin America, her research explores 20th-century struggles over inequality, justice, historical memory, and social inclusion, with particular attention to the politics of historical and archival knowledge production, Latin America's relationships with the United States and Spain, histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas, memory and post-conflict reckoning, and oral and ethnographic approaches to historical research. Born and raised in Canada, Weld holds a BA from McGill University and a PhD from Yale University, where her doctoral dissertation won institutional and national awards. Before arriving at Harvard, she taught for two years as the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Latin American History at Brandeis University. At Harvard, she offers courses in modern Latin American history, US-Latin American relations, archival theory, and historical methods. She received the Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016 and currently serves as president of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Weld has held research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the William F. Milton Fund.

Weld's first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Duke University Press, 2014), is a historical and ethnographic study of the massive archives generated by Guatemala's National Police. These documents functioned as tools of state repression during the country's civil war, were concealed from the truth commission investigating crimes against humanity, discovered by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed for historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. The book 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; a Spanish edition was published by AVANCSO in 2017. She is completing her second book, Ruins and Glory: The Long Spanish Civil War in Latin America (Harvard University Press, forthcoming), which traces the impact and legacies of the Spanish Civil War across the Americas from the 1930s to the present. Key articles include “The Other Door: Spain and the Guatemalan Counterrevolution, 1944-54” (Journal of Latin American Studies, 2019), “The Spanish Civil War and the Construction of a Reactionary Historical Consciousness in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile” (Hispanic American Historical Review, 2018), and the award-winning “Dignifying the Guerrillero, Not the Assassin: Rewriting a History of Criminal Subversion in Postwar Guatemala” (Radical History Review, 2012), which received the Best Article Prize from the Latin American Studies Association’s Recent History and Memory Section. Weld is on leave for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Professional Email: weld@fas.harvard.edu