The Pine Tree Foundation Lecture Series in Archives and Special Collections Presents:

“Resurrecting Paper Cadavers: Archives in Postwar Societies”

Dr. Kirsten Weld, Harvard University

A Collaborative Series Presented by the Queens College Libraries Department of Special Collections and Archives, the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, and the Pine Tree Foundation

Co-sponsored by the Queens College Latin American and Latino Studies Program

Inaugural Lecture: Kirsten Weld, Assistant Professor of History, Harvard University

Date/Time: Thursday November 5, 2015 at 6pm

Location: Queens College Rosenthal Library, Room 230

Kirsten Weld is a historian of modern Latin America. Her research centers on the 20th-century history of political and ideological conflict in the Americas, particularly during the region’s long Cold War, as well as on the politics of historical and archival knowledge production.

Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala[dukeupress.edu], was published by Duke University Press in 2014.  It is a historical and ethnographic study of the archives generated by Guatemala’s National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country’s civil war, kept hidden from the truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the war’s conclusion, stumbled upon and rescued by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. Paper Cadavers is a broad meditation on how history is produced as social knowledge, on the labour behind transformative social change, and on the stakes of the stories we tell ourselves about the past.