Dr Tanya Harmer

Dr Tanya Harmer is a specialist on the Cold War in Latin America with a particular interest in the international, transnational and global dynamics of the struggle. She has written an inter-American history of Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and conducted research on Brazilian Cold War interventions in the Southern Cone of Latin America, US-Chilean relations in the mid-1970s and the Cuban Revolution’s influence in Latin America. Her current research deals with the history of Chile’s Revolutionary Left. She has recently published articles on internationalist revolutionary guerrilla movements and transnational solidarity networks. Her next monograph will be a biography of Beatriz Allende and Chile’s revolutionary generation.

Dr Harmer obtained her BA at the University of Leeds before moving to the London School of Economics to do her MA and PhD in International History, for which she was awarded an AHRC scholarship. Prior to being appointed as a lecturer in the department in 2009, she was an LSE fellow. She has also held visiting teaching positions at Columbia University in New York (2012-13) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2010, 2013).

In addition to being closely associated with the LSE’s new Latin America and Carribbean Centre (LACC), Dr Harmer is the convener of the Latin America-Europe Cold War Research Network. She has received a number of grants to support international collaborative projects on Latin America and the Cold War. Most recently, she and Dr Alberto Martín of the Instituto Mora in Mexico City organized two international conferences on Global Histories of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left and Intellectual Cultures of Latin America’s Revolutionary Left with support from the British Academy. Prior to this, she was awarded an LSE Abbey-Santander award to organize an international conference on the Cold War at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and a British Academy UK-Latin America Link Programme award to work with the Fundação Getulio Vargas on a project looking at Brazil's role in Latin America during the Cold War and post-Cold War worlds.

In 2014, Dr Harmer was awarded one of the School’s Major Review Teaching Prizes and in 2015 she won a Student-led Teaching Excellence Award for Research Support and Guidance.

Dr Harmer is happy to supervise dissertations relating to twentieth-century Latin American history. She usually teaches the following courses:

At undergraduate level:

HY113: From Empire to Independence: The Extra-European World in the Twentieth Century (taught jointly with other members of staff in the Department)

HY239: Latin America and the United States since 1898

At Masters level:

HY444: The Cold War in Latin America

Dr Harmer also supervises the following PhD students:

Dr Harmer's first book, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 2011), won the Luciano Tomassini International Relations Book Award in 2013 and has now been published in Spanish as El gobierno de Allende y la Guerra Fria Interamericana (Santiago, Chile: UDP, 2013). The book focuses on the international history of Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73) and Chile's foreign relations with Cuba and the United States during this period. As well as examining the relationships between Santiago, Havana and Washington, it also deals with Chile's place within a multidimensional Cold War struggle in the Southern Cone in the early 1970s; Brazil's involvement in that struggle and its relationship with the Nixon administration; and Latin America's role in North-South debates.

More recently, Dr Harmer has published research on Chile and the Global Cold War, transnational Chile solidarity networks and the historiography of US-Latin American relations.

Her most recent publications include:

• ‘Commonality, Specificity, and Difference: Histories and Historiographies of the Americas’ in Cooperation and Hegemony in US-Latin American Relations: Revisiting the Western Hemisphere Idea, eds. Juan Pablo Scarfi and Andrew R. Tillman, Palgrave Macmillan, New York (2016)
• "The View from Havana: Chilean Exiles in Cuba and Early Resistance to Chile's Dictatorship, 1973–1977", Hispanic American Historical Review, 96:1 (2016)
• Chile y la Guerra Fría Global (Pontificia Univesidad Católica de Chile: RIL Editores, 2014)
• “Fractious allies: Chile, the United States and the Cold War, 1973-1976” Diplomatic History, 37: 1 (2013)
• “Two, three, many revolutions: Cuba and the prospects for revolutionary change in Latin America, 1967–1975”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 45:1 (2013)
• “Brazil's cold war in the southern Cone, 1970–1975”, Cold War History, 12:4 (2012)

Dr Harmer's current research focuses on the history of Chile’s Revolutionary Left and her next book will be a biography of Beatriz Allende and Chile’s revolutionary generation.

Full list of publications on LSE Research Online

2015

2014

2013

2010