"Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise," remote lecture by Lina Brito, assistant professor of history, Northwestern University.
Presented by the Georgia Workshop on Culture, Power, and History, a research seminar supported by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Link and registration information for remote presentation available soon.
Britto is an historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work situates the emergence and consolidation of illegal drug smuggling networks in the Caribbean and Andean regions of Colombia, particularly marijuana, in the context of a growing articulation between the country and the United States during the Cold War. She was awarded grants from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University, and her dissertation won a Martin Diskin Dissertation Award honorable mention from the Latin American Studies Association in 2014. She has published in Revista Contemporánea—from the Grupo de Estudios Interdisciplinario del Pasado Reciente (GEIPAR)— the Hispanic American Historical Review, North American Congress on Latin America-NACLA, and El Espectador (Colombia). She is preparing a book manuscript on Colombia’s marijuana boom in the 1970s based on extensive fieldwork and oral history in the Colombian Caribbean, as well as archival research in Colombia and the United States.
