The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the NYU Department of History presents, Hungry for Revolution: Reconsidering Chile’s Democratic Road to Socialism at 50 with the author, Joshua Frens-String (University of Texas-Austin) in conversation with Karin Rosemblatt (University of Maryland). Moderated by Sinclair Thomson (NYU History).
About the Book:
Hungry for Revolution tells the story of how struggles over food fueled the rise and fall of Chile's Popular Unity coalition and one of Latin America's most expansive social welfare states. Reconstructing ties among workers, consumers, scientists, and the state, Joshua Frens-String explores how Chileans across generations sought to center food security as a right of citizenship. In so doing, he deftly untangles the relationship between two of twentieth-century Chile's most significant political and economic processes: the fight of an emergent urban working class to gain reliable access to nutrient-rich foodstuffs and the state's efforts to modernize its underproducing agricultural countryside.
About the Participants:
Joshua Frens-String is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches classes on modern Latin America, US-Latin American relations, and revolution in 20th century Latin America, among other topics. As a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Institute of Latin American Studies this year, he is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile” (under advance contract with the University of California Press), which considers the role that food played in the rise and fall of Chile’s Popular Unity revolution. From 2015-2017, Frens-String served as managing editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas (based at CLACS-NYU). He received his Ph.D. in Latin American History at NYU in 2015.
Karin Rosemblatt is a Professor and Director of the Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland. She is interested in the transnational study of gender, race, ethnicity, and class and their relation to policymaking. Rosemblatt’s most recent book is The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950 (2018). In this book, she traces the history of the social and human sciences in Mexico and the United States, revealing intricate connections among the development of science, the concept of race, and policies toward indigenous peoples. This book was awarded the 2019 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers in the North American/US History category. Rosemblatt is also coeditor of an anthology on Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (2003). Her first book was Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (2000). This book examined how feminists, socialists, labor activists, social workers, physicians, and political leaders converged around a shared gender ideology and how that ideology shaped labor, health, and welfare policies. The book won the Berkshire Prize for the best first book by a woman historian, awarded by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.
Moderator, Sinclair Thomspson, is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at NYU and is the author of We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency.