Books

Longlist, 2025 Architecture Book Awards – Architectural Theory To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used ...

The Dictator Dilemma tells the story of US bilateral relations with the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989). Tyvela focuses on how and why that diplomatic relationship changed during the Cold War from cooperation, based on mutual opposition to communism, to conflict, based on clashing expectations concerning democratic reforms and human rights. The ...

Cinema can both reflect the world as it is and offer escape from it. In Modernity at the Movies, Camila Gatica Mizala explores the ideas of reflection versus escapism and examines how modes of understanding the current moment emerged through the practice of going to the movies in Santiago and ...

Between 1973 and 1990, the authoritarian military dictatorship of Chile maintained its control through a network of detention and torture centers designed to create fear and isolation. Spatial Solidarities illuminates how architects, artists, activists, and other political agents resisted the Chilean regime through spatial practices. Within these spaces, prisoners responded creatively: producing ...

Science under Adversity argues that the Global South served as a dynamic arena of scientific innovation, circulation, and international collaboration. In this richly detailed history of the development of Latin American physiology in the early- to mid-twentieth century, Marcos Cueto shows that productive tensions between doctors and scientists in Argentina, ...

Despite the precariousness of an oil-based economy and the government’s professed concern about climate change, a failure of imagination regarding alternatives continues to trap Venezuela in an oil-fueled status quo. Elizabeth Barrios examines the ideologies that helped normalize oil production in Venezuela, which further made oil-led development appear to ...

A man of many talents—naturalist, geographer, anthropologist, and political commentator—Alfred Russel Wallace made seminal contributions to science in the nineteenth century. With Wallace in the Field, Victor Rafael Limeira-DaSilva unpacks the early life of one of the most beloved and famous Victorian scientific figures. Focusing on Wallace’s ...

Is photography a Eurocentric practice that others its subjects? In Exposing the Nation, Matthias Pfaller makes the case with a review of a national historiography of photography and images produced in Chile over the course of a century. There are multiple photographies, and they have a variety of uses: science, ...

As rigorous scientific and philosophical discourse circulated during the Enlightenment, aided by the Republic of Letters, a revolutionary understanding of gender emerged that would impact nation building in Europe and the Americas. In From Virile to Sterile, Adriana Novoa analyzes the cosmopolitan citizens of this metaphysical republic—an international community ...

Gender and sexual morality, and their intersections with race and class, were central to the formation of urban Brazil in the twentieth century. In the Darkness of the Cinema takes a wide-ranging and innovative approach to gender and moviegoing culture in Brazilian society. By focusing on the flirtations and romances ...

Empires and Explorations interweaves nineteenth-century Brazilian history, the extraordinary life of Richard Francis Burton, and the use of travel writing by historians. Burton witnessed the origins of the early processes of nation-building in Brazil, including the power and influence of Great Britain on the Brazilian monarchy that had declared its ...

During the crucial period of its formation, the opposing forces of corruption and anticorruption shaped Venezuela’s new national state and its relationship with society. National strongman Juan Vicente Gómez, who ruled from 1908 to 1935, fastened control over key areas of the economy, extracted wealth from the Venezuelan people, and ...

The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor’s original study ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment ...

Philosopher Michel Foucault’s cultural criticism crosses disciplines and is well known as an influence on modern conceptions of knowledge and power. Less well known are the five trips he took to Brazil between 1965 and 1976. Although a coup in 1964 had installed a military dictatorship, Foucault kept his opinion on the ...

Winner, 2024 RMCLAS Thomas McGann Award Argentine women’s long resistance to extreme rightists, tyranny, and militarism culminated in the Junta de la Victoria, or Victory Board, a group that organized in the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in defiance of the neutralist and Axis-leaning government in ...