Elena Jackson Albarrán
Biography
Dr. Albarrán teaches courses in modern Latin American history, comparative histories of childhood (Latin American, world, and Cold War), modern Mexico, Latin American revolutions, commodity exchange, and visual culture. Albarrán has collaborated with other faculty in the design and development of team-taught courses in History: 1968, The Year that Changed the World (Fall 2014), and Food and Desire in World History (Spring 2016). She was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Educator Award in 2020, and the Miami University Prodesse Quam Conspici Award in 2022.
As a scholar, Dr. Albarrán is a cultural historian of twentieth-century Latin America and the history of childhood, with expertise in Mexico. Her first book, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (University of Nebraska Press 2015), won the María Elena Martínez prize for the best book in Mexican history. Her second book, Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill 2024) brings together the metaphorical and real representations of children in the cultural politics of inter-American relations in the 1930s and 1940s, with case studies in child art, exile, and diplomacy. Albarrán is co-editor and contributor to the volume Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 2012). Her research on the intersections of national and transitional youth identities through the Mexican Boy Scouts has been published as a chapter anthology Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan 2015). Her work on the rhetorical construction of the proletarian child in Mexico as a national ideal was published as a chapter in the collection Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme, and Power (University of Arizona Press 2015). She has written historiographical essays on the histories of Mexican History and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell 2011) and Oxford Handbook of Mexican History (Oxford University Press 2020), respectively. Furthermore, she has made critical theoretical and methodological interventions that have helped to shape the field of childhood history, as in the chapter contribution “‘So How’s Your Childhood Going?’ A Historian of Childhood Confronts Her Own Archive,” in the edited volume Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Approaches to Research in a Global Context, Eds. MJ Maynes, Deborah Levison and Frances Vavrus. (Palgrave MacMillan 2021).
Albarrán continues to build pedagogical and research partnerships with colleagues from around the world. She is a founding member of the Latin American childhood scholars' network Red de Historiadores de las Infancias de América Latina (REHIAL). Her long-term collaborations with scholars of childhood are reflected in her contributions to the Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents (YaSOA) working group through the University of Minnesota's Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change, and the multivalent international project Re-Connect/Re-Collect (University of Tampere, Finland.)
Education
- Ph.D. Department of History, University of Arizona, 2008
- Major field: Latin America; Minor fields: Historical Theory and Art History
- M.A. Latin American Studies, University of Arizona, 2002
- Major field: Mexico Area Studies; Minor field: Human Rights
- B.A. Latin American Studies, Bowdoin College, 1998
- Major field: Anthropology; Minor field: Spanish
Teaching and Research Interests
- Twentieth-century Latin America, history of Mexico, cultural nationalism
- Comparative Cold War childhoods, youth and mobility
- Capitalism and development
Courses Taught
- LAS 410G From the Amazon to Amazon.com: Capitalism and Commodities in the Americas
- LAS 410A Youth, Social Change, and Democracy in Latin America
- HST 670C Development and Equality in the Americas
- HST 296 World History since 1945
- HST/LAS 217 Modern Latin American History
- HST 296 Travel in Cold War Europe
- HST/LAS 319 Revolution in Latin America
- LAS/SPN 332 Latin American Popular Culture
- HST 360 Comparative Cold War Childhood
- HST 360T Mexico since Independence
- LAS 410/510 Latin American Issues
- LAS 410J Child and Nation in Latin America
- HST 400G Senior Capstone: Art, Power, and History in 20th-Century Latin America
- HST 400R Senior Capstone: History of Modern Childhood
Work in Progress
Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill 2024).
Albarrán's book (in press) examines the transnational circulation of children and children's culture in the Americas in the Good Neighbor period (1930s-1940s). Children's heightened public visibility during these decades of enhanced mobility and internationalism allowed discourses about the social meaning of children to intersect with new and established narratives about infantilized subjects, development, hemispheric power relations, and capitalism in the period leading up to the Cold War. The book explores case studies of children's art, child refugees, and child diplomacy in Latin America.
Selected Publications
- Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill 2024)
- Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Nebraska, 2015)
- “Anarchive, Oral Histories, and Teaching Comparative Cold War Childhoods across Geographies and Generations,” (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War, Eds. Zsuzsa Millei, Nelli Piattoeva, Iveta Silova, Mnemo ZIN (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024): 329-348.
- “Diplomatas de calças curtas. El desarrollo latinoamericano como símbolo y práctica entre niños y hombres.” In Cartografías das infâncias: História, representações e sensibilidades na América Latina. Orgs. Silvia Maria Fávero Arend, Camila Serafim Daminelli, Daniel Alves Boeira, and Elisangela Da Silva Machieski. Criciúma (Santa Catarina, Brasil): UNESC, 2024. Pp. 14-23.
- “Globalizing the Americas Through Twentieth-Century Youth Organizations,” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Studies, Ed. James Marten. (Print edition 2023).
- “Infancia y la política cultural del desarrollo en el Día Panamericano, 1930-1948,” Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud 19:3 (septiembre-diciembre 2021): 1-26.
- “‘So How’s Your Childhood Going?’ A Historian Confronts Her Own Archive,” Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Approaches to Research in a Global Context, Eds. MJ Maynes, Deborah Levison and Frances Vavrus. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021. Pp. 13-32.
- “Prólogo: Infancias y juventudes en la historia latinoamericana (siglo XX),” Infâncias y juventudes no século XX: histórias latino-americanas. Eds. Silvia Maria F. Arend, Esmeralda Blanco B. de Moura, and Susana Sosenski. Ponta Grossa [Brazil]: Editora Todapalavra, 2018, pp. 13-20.
- “Educating the Nation’s Youth,” Oxford Handbook of Mexican History, Ed. William H. Beezley. Oxford University Press, July 2020.
- “The Three Faces of the Family, 1870-present.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History [online]. Ed. William H. Beezley. September 2015.
- Child and Nation in Latin American Student Capstone Blog
- "Guerrilla Warplay: The Infantilization of War in Latin American Popular Culture," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, vol. 24, 2005.
- "A Century of Childhood: Growing up in Twentieth-Century Mexico," in William H. Beezley, ed., A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
- "Comino vence al diablo and Other Terrifying Episodes: Itinerant Children's Puppet Theater in 1930s Mexico," The Americas, v. 67, n. 3, January 2011, 355-374.
- Co-editor, with Susana Sosenski, Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina: entre prácticas y representaciones (New Approaches to the History of Childhood in Latin America: Between Practice and Representations), Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012.
- Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Winner of the 2016 Maria Elena Martinez book award of the Conference on Latin American History.
- "El niño proletario: Jesús Sansón Flores and the New Revolutionary Redeemer, 1935-1938" in Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme, and Power, eds. Stephen Neufeld and Michael Matthews, University of Arizona Press, 2015.
- "Boy Scouts under the Aztec Sun: Mexican Youth and the Transnational Construction of Identity, 1917-40" in Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century, eds. Richard Ivan Jobs and David M. Pomfret, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
- "Los niños colaboradores de la revista Pulgarcito y la construcción de la infancia, México 1925-1932" ("Child Contributors to Pulgarcito Magazine and the Construction of Childhood, Mexico 1925-1932"), Iberoamericana 15:60, 2015.