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Catherine Komisaruk

Latin America

Office: 224 SH

Office Hours:
T/Th 12:45-2:15PM
and by appointment

Tel: (319) 384-3284

Email: catherine-komisaruk@uiowa.edu

Research

Teaching

Publications

Awards &
Service

Research

Catherine Komisaruk's research interests are in the social and cultural history of colonial Latin America, particularly Mexico and Central America. Currently she is completing a book titled Labor and Love in Guatemala, 1760-1837. A social history of late colonial Guatemala, the book explores the ways that gradual transformations in labor forms, gender roles and family structures, and ethnic hierarchies prefigured independence from Spain.

She received the Ph.D. at UCLA in 2000. Before coming to Iowa, she was an assistant professor at California State University, Long Beach. She also taught for several years at the secondary level in Guatemala City.

Teaching

Courses recently taught by Professor Komisaruk:

  • 16W:051 Colloquium for History Majors (World)
  • 16W:106 Society and Revolution in Cuba
  • 16W:107 History of Mexico
  • 16W:111 Colonial Latin America
  • 16:288/35:247 Readings in Latin American History

Publications

  • Labor and Love in Guatemala, 1760-1837, under contract with Stanford University Press.
  • "Becoming Free, Becoming Ladino: Slave Emancipation and Mestizaje in Late Colonial Guatemala." In Between Race and Place: Blacks and Blackness in Central America, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
  • "Rape Narratives, Rape Silences: Sexual Violence and Judicial Testimony in Colonial Guatemala." Biography 31:3, 369-396.
  • Guest editor with Kathleen McHugh, Biography 31:3 (Summer 2008), cluster issue: "Something Other Than Autobiography: Collaborative Life-Narratives in the Americas."
  • "Juicios de violencia sexual en la Guatemala tardía colonial." In Los rostros de la violencia: Guatemala y El Salvador Siglos XVII y XIX, ed. Ana Margarita Gómez and Sajid Alfredo Herrera Mena (San Salvador: Editorial Universidad Centroamericana, 2007), 47-78.
  • "'The Work It Cost Me': Slaves and Free Africans in Guatemala, 1770-1825." Urban History Workshop Review 5 (1999): 4-24.
  • Co-editor with James W. Wilkie and José Guadalupe Ortega, Statistical Abstract of Latin America, volume 32 (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1996).
  • Co-editor with James W. Wilkie and Carlos Alberto Contreras, Statistical Abstract of Latin America, volume 31 (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1995).

Awards & Service

  • UI American Indian and Native Studies Program Steering Committee Member, 2008-present.
  • Old Gold Summer Fellowship, University of Iowa, 2007.
  • American Association of University Women American Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 2003-04.
  • University of California Humanities Research Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship , spring 2001.
  • Honorary Student Marshal, UCLA Doctoral Commencement, 2001.
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2005. All rights reserved.		 Department of History, 280 Schaeffer Hall, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, 52242. Tel: 319-335-2299. FAX: 319-335-2293.