Karin Rosemblatt

Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt is a historian of twentieth-century Latin America. She is interested in the transnational study of gender, race, ethnicity, and class and their relation to policymaking. Rosemblatt’s most recent book is The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950 (2018) winner of the PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers for the best book in North American/US History in 2019. In this book, she traces the history of the social and human sciences in Mexico and the United States, revealing intricate connections among the development of science, the concept of race, and policies toward indigenous peoples. Rosemblatt coedited Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (2003). Her first book was Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (2000), which won the Berkshire Prize for the best first book by a woman historian, awarded by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. 

Rosemblatt is the principal investigator for a five-year National Science Foundation that supports the Red de Estudios de las Ciencias y los Saberes en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (RECSLAC, Network for the Study of Sciences and Knowledges in Latin America and the Caribbean). RECSLAC Promotes research on the histories of science, technology, environment, medicine, and other knowledge practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. It sponsors pedagogy workshops, conferences, and workshops for graduate students, and runs a website.  

Rosemblatt currently serves on the Editorial Committee of Historia Crítica and History of the Social Sciences. From 2011 to 2018, she served on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Women’s History. She has held fellowships from Fulbright and the National Endowment for Humanities and been a fellow at New York University and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Scholar Award for her work on race.

Rosemblatt is the author of:

"Investigating Cuauhtémoc's Bones: Politics, Truth, and Mestizo Nationalism in Mexico," in Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences: Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific, edited by Adam Warren, Julia Rodriguez, and Stephen Casper. London: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

"Bodies, Environments, and Race: Roots and Branches of Eugenic Nationalism in the Long Twentieth Century" in Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Ana Barahona, ed. (Cham: Springer, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48616-7_31-1.

"Modernization, Dependency, and the Global in Mexican Critiques of Anthropology, 1945-1970," Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (March 2014): 94-121. Winner of the biennial best article prize, Forum for the History of the Human Sciences

"Other Americas: Transnationalism, the Culture of Poverty, and the Politics of Scholarship in Mexico and the United States." Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 4 (November 2009): 603-41. Honorable mention, best article prize, American Sociological Association, Section on the Political Economy of the World System

"Welfare States, Neoliberal Regimes, and International Political Economy: The Gender Politics of Latin America in Global Context," Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 149-62.

"Sexuality and Biopower in Chile and Latin America." Political Power and Social Theory 15 (2001): 315-72.

 "Charity, Rights, Entitlement: Labor Politics and Welfare for Workers in Popular-Front Chile." Hispanic American Historical Review 81, nos. 3-4 (November 2001): 555-86.

 "'What We Can Reclaim of the Old Values of the Past': Sexual Morality and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile." Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 1 (January 2001): 149-80.

 "Por un hogar bien constituido: El Estado y su política familiar en los frentes populares" in Disciplina y desacato: Construcción de identidad en Chile, siglos XIX y XX, edited by Lorena Godoy, Elizabeth Hutchison, Karin Rosemblatt, and M. Soledad Zárate.