Mariana Díaz Chalela
Assistant Professor of International History
Mariana Díaz Chalela is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. She is a historian of modern Latin America interested in the relationship between economic development and political violence, property rights, and transitional justice.
Her first book project traces the political and social history of agricultural credit in Colombia from the Great Depression through the height of the Cold War. The book connects the histories of international development and foreign debt to the everyday politics of rural life in Latin America.
Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Tinker Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the John Rovensky Fellowship in Business and Economic History, the George W. Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy, and the MacMillan Center in International and Area Studies.
Professor Díaz Chalela also collaborates with an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners to rethink issues of memory and repair, particularly in the context of human rights and transitional justice archives in Latin America.
Prior to becoming a historian, she worked as a lawyer in Colombia and continues to explore the intersections between law and history. She received her PhD in History from Yale University, and holds an LLB (JD equivalent) and an MA in History from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.