With the new season of Dissertation Reviews up and running, it is my great pleasure to share exciting and important news with the DR community.
Jennifer Lambe, our Field Editor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, has accepted our invitation to become a Managing Editor here at Dissertation Reviews. She will be working with myself, her fellow Managing Editors Leon Rocha and Matthew Melvin-Koushki, as well as the entire editorial committee and participants of the project, to steward the continued growth of Dissertation Reviews. We are delighted to begin this new working relationship with Jennifer, and we extend our heartfelt congratulations.
To learn more about the entire Dissertation Reviews Editorial Committee, please visit this page.
– Tom Mullaney, Editor-in-Chief
Here is a note from Jennifer:
My involvement with Dissertation Reviews began in 2012, when I began to notice more and more colleagues in other fields sharing announcements about DR online. I was immediately inspired by the collaborative and interdisciplinary approach modeled by the project, and I felt that Latin American and Caribbean Studies was overdue for such a platform. When I proposed the field to Tom and Leon, I was overwhelmed by their enthusiastic response. Latin American and Caribbean Studies launched with a mini-season in spring 2013. The first reviews ranged across the geographical, linguistic, and chronological expanse of Latin America and the Caribbean—including Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, the Philippines under Spanish rule, and the colonial Andes—and tapped into burgeoning areas of transnational and interdisciplinary scholarship.
The upcoming season of Latin American and Caribbean Studies will continue to highlight the astonishing diversity and sophistication of new research on Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as regional, transatlantic, and transpacific links. Across many fields, scholars are increasingly being asked to think and teach in global terms. In light of that reality, I am encouraged by the intellectual networks that are regularly forged across geographical, thematic, and disciplinary boundaries on the site. Even more heartening, the digital platform facilitates connections across present-day geographical borders, providing a framework for conversations between scholars on different continents. Dissertation Reviews puts cutting-edge work from other spaces and places right at our fingertips. It pushes us to stretch our intellectual horizons beyond the confines of our own disciplines.
Consequently, I was absolutely thrilled when Tom, Leon, and Matt invited me to become a new Managing Editor on the project. I am eagerly anticipating the launch of the new season, and I look forward to exciting collaborations of all kinds. As the Dissertation Reviews project continues to grow—and exponentially at that—I firmly believe that it will continue to move us closer to the kind of engaged academic community to which we all aspire.
Jennifer Lambe
PhD Candidate
Department of History
Yale University
jennifer.lambe@dissertationreviews.org
Jennifer Lambe is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Yale University, where she focuses on modern Caribbean and Latin American history. Her dissertation, “Baptism by Fire: The Making and Remaking of Madness in Cuba, 1857-1980,” examines the history of mental illness and mental healing in Cuba from the late colonial period through 1980, with a focus on both institutional psychiatry and popular healing. The project traces the history of the Mazorra Mental Hospital, the only public psychiatric facility in Cuba until the 1959 Revolution and an iconic site of political intervention and social reform. Jenny has published in Cuba: People, Culture, History (ed. Alan West-Durán, 2011) and Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe.
Image: Palácio da Alvorada at night — the official residence of the President of Brazil, in Brasília. Photograph by Thum_Fel. Wikimedia Commons.
