Miriam Pensack is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her scholarship and teaching focus on modern Latin American political history and U.S. foreign policy in the region, with particular emphases on the inter-American Cold War, national security, and immigration in the Americas.
While at the Society of Fellows, she is at work on her first book project, preliminary titled The Empire Within: Guantánamo Bay and the Panama Canal from the Cold War to the War on Terror. The book examines the imbricated histories of Washington’s base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and the former US-controlled Panama Canal Zone to trace shifting expressions of Latin American sovereignty and US hegemony during and immediately following the Cold War. With a particular eye to the lived experience of those who negotiated these imperial relations, the book follows the statesmen, laborers, financiers, insurgents, and refugees whose fates converged in these spaces.
Alongside her academic research, Pensack is also a journalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Pensack holds a Ph.D. from New York University and a B.A. from Columbia University, both in History. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Goizueta Foundation Fellowship at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, the Tinker Foundation and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU.
