“Battles for Belonging: Women Journalists, Political Culture, and the Paradoxes of Inclusion in Colombia, 1943-1970” An Arts and Humanities Workshop

Arts and Humanities Workshop

“Battles for Belonging: Women Journalists, Political Culture, and the Paradoxes of Inclusion in Colombia, 1943-1970”

Speaker:

Sandra Sánchez-López, Cogut Visiting Professor, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown University; Associate Professor, School of Arts and Humanities, Universidad de los Andes.

Organizer:

Alejandra Vela, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.

Moderators:

Lol-bé González, PhD student from RLL, Harvard

Yam Traiber, Phd Student from Comparative Literature, Harvard

What has it been like to research and write about the history of women in the press and their efforts to expand political action in an exclusionary society in the mid-20th century? What do we learn about dislocations and (new) historiographical consensus when we focus on women, even though they themselves contributed to a hierarchical society through their gender crusades? Sandra Sanchez-Lopez presents her research questions here, how they have changed, what it has been like to work with varied sources for this research on women, and the motivations that have sustained the production of this history.

This event will be conducted in Spanish.

About the Speaker: Sandra Sánchez–López is Cogut Visiting Professor at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Humanities at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. In 2024, she published her book “Battles for Belonging: Women Journalists, Political Culture, and the Paradoxes of Inclusion in Colombia, 1943-1970,” which received the Micheal Jimenez Honorable Mention from Lasa’s Colombia Section in May 2025. She is currently co-curating the 2026 main exhibition at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango –one of Colombia’s leading cultural institutions– which, under her leadership, will spotlight its collections of women’s archival materials. She is also developing a project titled “The Body Archive or How to Re-write History in Times of Peace and War,” which asks how movement and phenomenology might open new possibilities for archival analysis, inviting historians to reimagine the stories they tell and the methods they use.

November 4, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, DRCLAS, CGIS South, S216, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA