History Seminar: Latin America in Catholicism's Global Cold War
Convener(s): Eduardo Posada-Carbo
Speaker(s): Jaime Pensado, University of Notre Dame; Daniel L. McDonald, Oxford; Simon Unger, Fribourg
To join online, please register in advance (zoom link to follow)
Jaime M. Pensado is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Mexico Working Group at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in contemporary Mexican history, student movements, youth culture, the Global Sixties, and the Cold War. He co-edited México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies (Arizona University Press, September 2018) with Enrique C. Ochoa and is the author of Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties (Stanford University Press, 2013) and Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico (University of California Press, 2023).
Daniel L. McDonald is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of History and the Latin American Centre and an associate member of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. He is a member of the “Global Pontificate of Pius XII” research group. McDonald is a historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean with focuses on Brazil and the global history of Catholicism. His current work centers on liberation theology, popular and transnational Catholic social movements, urban history, citizenship, and the Cold War. McDonald has published articles in the American Historical Review, the Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, and the Journal of Urban History.
Simon Unger’s research focuses on the history of the Vatican in the postwar period. He received his doctorate in modern European history at the University of Oxford in 2018 and his German Habilitation from the University of Fribourg in 2023. At the German Historical Institute in Rome, he is the principal investigator of the research group “The Global Pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958.” Simon was a visiting professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and currently teaches as an associate professor (Privatdozent) at Fribourg in Switzerland.
About this event:
This seminar brings together the three organizers of the “Catholicism and the Cold War in Latin America” conference sponsored by the “Global Pontificate of Pius XII” research group and held at Oxford from November 21-22, 2024. Together, Jaime Pensado, Daniel McDonald, and Simon Unger will examine the place of Latin America and Catholicism in the Cold War and reflect on the conference contributions. Far from a peripheral space, Latin America comprised a central battleground in Catholicism’s Cold War and a key node in transnational Catholic networks spanning the Americas and the Atlantic.
