Tanya Harmer

Biography

Dr Tanya Harmer is a specialist on the Cold War in Latin America with a particular interest in the international, transnational and global dynamics of the struggle. She has written an inter-American history of Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and conducted research on Brazilian Cold War interventions in the Southern Cone of Latin America, US-Chilean relations in the mid-1970s and the Cuban Revolution’s influence in Latin America. Her current research deals with the history of Chile’s Revolutionary Left. She has recently published articles on internationalist revolutionary guerrilla movements and transnational solidarity networks. Her next monograph will be a biography of Beatriz Allende and Chile’s revolutionary generation.

Dr Harmer obtained her BA at the University of Leeds before moving to the London School of Economics to do her MA and PhD in International History, for which she was awarded an AHRC scholarship. Prior to being appointed as a lecturer in the department in 2009, she was an LSE fellow. She has also held visiting teaching positions at Columbia University in New York (2012-13) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2010, 2013).

In addition to being closely associated with the LSE’s new Latin America and Carribbean Centre (LACC), Dr Harmer is the convener of the Latin America-Europe Cold War Research Network. She has received a number of grants to support international collaborative projects on Latin America and the Cold War. Most recently, she and Dr Alberto Martín of the Instituto Mora in Mexico City organized two international conferences on Global Histories of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left and Intellectual Cultures of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left with support from the British Academy. Prior to this, she was awarded an LSE Abbey-Santander award to organize an international conference on the Cold War at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a British Academy UK-Latin America Link Programme award to work with the Fundação Getulio Vargas on a project looking at Brazil's role in Latin America during the Cold War and post-Cold War worlds.

In 2014, Dr Harmer was awarded one of the School’s Major Review Teaching Prizes and in 2015 she won a Student-led Teaching Excellence Award for Research Support and Guidance.

Courses

Dr Harmer usually teaches the following courses:

At undergraduate level:

• HY113: From Empire to Independence: The Extra-European World in the Twentieth Century (taught jointly with other members of staff in the Department)
• HY120: Historical Approaches to the Modern World (taught jointly with other members of staff in the Department)
• HY239: People, Power and Protest in Latin America, c.1895 to the Present Day

At postgraduate level:

• HY444: The Cold War in Latin America
• HY501: International History Research Student Workshop
• HY509: International History Research Seminar

Publications

Dr Harmer's first book, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2011), won the Luciano Tomassini International Relations Book Award in 2013 and has now been published in Spanish as El gobierno de Allende y la Guerra Fria Interamericana (Santiago, Chile: UDP, 2013). The book focuses on the international history of Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and Chile's foreign relations with Cuba and the United States during this period. As well as examining the relationships between Santiago, Havana and Washington, it also deals with Chile's place within a multidimensional Cold War struggle in the Southern Cone in the early 1970s; Brazil's involvement in that struggle and its relationship with the Nixon administration; and Latin America's role in North-South debates.

Dr Harmer's second book, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), is the history of Chile, youth politics and the revolutionary left in the long 1960s. It deals with Cuba’s influence in Chile after 1959, transnational guerrilla movements, the Unidad Popular years, exile and solidarity. It examines what it meant to be a female revolutionary in the age of Che Guevara and Salvador Allende and, in doing so, it tells the history of women and gender politics in Cold War Latin America.

Her newest book, a co-edited volume with Alberto Martín Alvares, Toward a Global History of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left, was released by University Press of Florida in April 2021.

Beyond these books Dr  Harmer has published articles, chapters and edited other volumes on Latin America as follows:

• Special Issue: Chile’s Popular Unity (UP) Experiment at 50. Radical Americas, 6:1 (2021) (co-edited; with introduction co-written with Marian Schlotterbeck and Joshua Frens-String, "Fifty years after Popular Unity: Chile’s estallido social in historical context" and article self-authored, "Towards a global history of the Unidad Popular").
• "Un replanteamiento de la Guerra Fría en América Latina anteel centenario de la Revolución Bolchevique" in La Revolución Bolchevique y América Latina: Apropriaciones, experiencias y trayectorias edited by Santiago Aránguiz Pinto (Santiago: Ril Editores, 2020)
• "The 'Cuban Question' and the Cold War in Latin America, 1959–1964", Journal of Cold War Studies, 21:3 (2019).
• Virtual Special Issue: The Cold War in Latin America. Journal of Latin American Studies (2018) (with introduction).
• Special Issue: Revolutionary Transnationalism in Historical Perspective: Militant Networks in the Americas. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017) (with introduction, co-edited with Alberto Martín Alvarez).
• Special Issue: Revolutionary Transnationalism in Historical Perspective: Militant Networks in the Americas. Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017) (with introduction, co-edited with Alberto Martín Alvarez).
• "Dialogue or Détente: Henry Kissinger, Latin America, and the Prospects for a New Inter-American Understanding, 1973-1977" in Foreign Policy at the Periphery: The Shifting Margins of US International Relations since World War II, eds. Bevan Sewell and Maria Ryan, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington (2017)
• "'Serémos como el Che': Chilean elenos, Bolivia and the cause of Latinoamericanismo, 1967-1970"Contemporanea (2016).
• ‘Commonality, Specificity, and Difference: Histories and Historiographies of the Americas’ in Cooperation and Hegemony in US-Latin American Relations: Revisiting the Western Hemisphere Idea, eds. Juan Pablo Scarfi and Andrew R. Tillman, Palgrave Macmillan, New York (2016)
• "The View from Havana: Chilean Exiles in Cuba and Early Resistance to Chile's Dictatorship, 1973–1977", Hispanic American Historical Review, 96:1 (2016)
• Chile y la Guerra Fría Global (Pontificia Univesidad Católica de Chile: RIL Editores, 2014)
• “Fractious allies: Chile, the United States and the Cold War, 1973-1976”Diplomatic History, 37: 1 (2013)
• “Two, three, many revolutions: Cuba and the prospects for revolutionary change in Latin America, 1967–1975”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 45:1 (2013)
• “Brazil's cold war in the southern Cone, 1970–1975”, Cold War History, 12:4 (2012)