I am a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to teaching general surveys, I also offer courses on public health, revolution and counterrevolution, literature and dictatorship, conspiracy theories, and commodities. One of the core ideas of all of my classes is that we cannot understand the United States without understanding Latin America and the Caribbean. And the histories of Latin America and the Caribbean should be viewed within wider global narratives. Students often remark that Latin America and the Caribbean barely exists in high school history classes. The region is rarely mentioned in U.S. courses and gets short shrift in world history courses. I hope that my courses can offer a corrective to these deficits.
My book Madness in Buenos Aires: Patients, Psychiatrists, and the Argentine State, 1880-1983 was published in 2008. Since then, I have published articles on the history of military conscription in Argentina, obesity in Latin America, and many book reviews. My current work is focused on the history of conspiracy theories. Here is a list of major publications to date.
"A Global History of Lies: Rumors, Conspiracy Theories, and Hoaxes-A Syllabus," Clio and the Contemporary (Summer 2024)
“Pescado podrido. Domestic and International Circuits of Argentine Rumors and Conspiracy Theories (1930-1943),” (co-authored with Ernesto Bohoslavsky, Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento) Journal of Social History) Volume 55, Number 1, Fall 2021
“Archivos, Derechos Humanos y Psiquiatría en Argentina” in Teresa Ordorika Sacristan and Aida Alejandra Golcman, editors. Locura en el Archivo: Fuentes y metodologias para el estuido de las disciplinas psi (Mexico City: Coleccion Debate y Reflexcion, 2021)
“Framing the Latin American Nutrition Transition in Historical Perspective” História, Ciencia, Saúde: Manguinhos (2021)
‘”Our archaic system:” Debating and Reforming Military Justice in Argentina, 1905-1935,’ Journal of Latin American Studies Volume52-November (2020)
“Counter-revolution without revolutionaries: Conspiracy in the Barracks, 1919-1930” A Contracorriente Vol. 17 No. 3 (2020): Spring 2020
“‘The barracks receives spoiled children and returns men:’ Debating Military Service, Masculinity and Nation-building in Argentina, 1901-1930” The Americas (July 2017): 299-330
“Authoritarianism, democracy and psychiatric reform in Argentina, 1946-1983,” History of Psychiatry (September 2003): 361-76.
“¿Dónde está el delirio?: La autoridad psiquiátrica y el estado argentino en perspectiva histórica,” in María Silvia Di Liscia and Ernesto Bohoslasky, editors, Instituciones y formas de control social en América Latina, 1880-1940 (Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina, 2005): 199-216.
“The limits of psychiatric reform in Argentina, 1890-1946,” in Roy Porter and David Wright, editors, The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2003): 226-47.
“Law, medicine and confinement to public psychiatric hospitals in twentieth century Argentina,” in Mariano Ben Plotkin, editor Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, the State, and Society in Argentina, 1880-1970. (University of New Mexico Press, 2003): 87-112.
“My New Attendance Policy,” Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 52:4 (April 2014): 29-30.
Works in Progress
“’Sin pensar en las consecuencias’: Desertion from the Army during the Argentine Dictatorship (1976-1983)” (will submit to peer reviewed journal in Fall 2024)
Please email me at jablard@ithaca.edu if you have questions!