Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Mexico, Latin America, political parties, state formation, women's rights, citizenship, opposition movements, political violence

About Me: Sarah Osten is a historian of Latin America at the University of Vermont, specializing in twentieth century Mexico.

Her first book, The Mexican Revolution’s Wake: The Making of a Political System, 1920-1929(Cambridge University Press, 2018) is social and political history of regional Socialist parties that set critical precedents for the creation of Mexico’s single party-dominated system in the years following the Mexican Revolution.

Osten holds a PhD in history (2010) and a MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies (2004) from the University of Chicago. Her BA is from Brown University.

Before coming to UVM, Osten was a visiting assistant professor of history and a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Northwestern University.

Her current and planned future research examines long-term legacies of political violence in modern Mexico, and the changing meanings of “revolution” in Mexican politics during the twentieth century.

In Latin America more generally, she is particularly interested in campaigns and elections, political violence and peace processes, the formulation of citizenship and rights, and the relationships between governments and opposition movements.

Recent Publications: 2018: The Mexican Revolution’s Wake: The Making of a Political System, 1920–1929. Cambridge Latin American Studies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

2016: “Mexico’s Political Laboratory: The Revolutionary and Postrevolutionary Southeast,” article for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (online).

2014: “A Crooked Path to the Franchise: Women’s Suffrage and the Legislation of Citizenship in Post-revolutionary Mexico, 1925-1937.” The Latin Americanist, June 2014, Volume 58, Issue 2, 97-117.

2013: “Trials By Fire: National Political Lessons From Failed State Elections in Post- revolutionary Mexico, 1920-5.” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Winter 2013 (February), Volume 29, Number 1, 238-279.