Conor Lane

Conor Lane is a 2013 graduate of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he received three degrees in history, Spanish language and literature and Latin American and Caribbean studies. While at Michigan, Conor served as editor-in-chief of the university’s undergraduate history journal, spearheading its expansion into a nationwide journal during his tenure. Conor simultaneously served on the executive board of an international education development partnership called The Quito Project, working two summers on-location in Ecuador and collaborating during the year with members of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education and various international universities on strategies to promote sustainability and growth of the program model in underserved neighborhoods of the Ecuadorian capital. For two years, Conor also organized support programs at the Spectrum Center, Michigan’s LGBTQ resource center for students and faculty, facilitating closed coming out dialog groups and running an LGBTQ mentorship program. In his senior year, Conor also worked full-time with the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, assisting political affairs officers and U.S. ambassadors in the U.N. Security Council.

Following graduation, Conor was named a Fulbright Scholar and moved to Bogotá, Colombia, where he worked as a professor of English language and American history at Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca and volunteered part-time for Colombia Diversa, South America’s largest LGBTQ political advocacy group. Conor then moved to San José, Costa Rica, having been named a Princeton in Latin America Fellow, and worked as a research assistant at the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, a progressive think tank, where, among other accomplishments, he designed and drafted several multi-million dollar projects focusing on curbing cyclical community violence and runaway rates of homicide disproportionately affecting women and LGBTQ-identified individuals in Central America.

For more than two years, Conor has also worked as an on-call Spanish-English translator with the U.S. Department of State, where he’s collaborated primarily with U.S. embassy staff stationed in Central America and members of the Colombian military. Among other accomplishments, Conor translated the official Spanish language version of the 2015 U.S. congressional contract, sent to the presidents of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, which granted those countries over $750 million in U.S. foreign aid, and has also had his translations used by members of the National Security Council, including former President Obama.

At Columbia and LSE, Conor explored the role of diplomacy, language and intellectual exchange in shaping emergent nationalistic identities and state formation across the transatlantic world, with a particular focus on the Americas, during the late colonial and early national periods. As a fluent speaker of Spanish, English and Portuguese and learner of French, Conor's research takes into account diverse, multilingual perspectives on the issue.