Jordana Dym is Associate Professor of History. She holds a BA in History and MA in Russian and East European Studies from Stanford University, and a PhD in History from New York University. A junior year abroad in Paris confirmed a life-long interest in French history, language and cultures. Between college and graduate school, she was a Foreign Service Officer and had the opportunity to live in Honduras and New York, working on issues relating to Central America and North Africa. Learning Spanish for the job and traveling from the mountains to the coasts of Honduras and up to the highlands of Guatemala and down to the plantations of Nicaragua sparked an interest in Central American history that led to a doctoral dissertation and then book on the role of city governments and city politics on nineteenth-century Central American nation-state formation. Additional research interests include the histories of travel and cartography, and the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic world.
Professor Dym joined the Skidmore faculty in 2000. She teaches a survey of Latin American history, as well as courses in the history department on topics ranging from the history of travel and travel writing in Latin America; race, class and gender; and war and peace in twentieth-century Latin America. She offers a first-year seminar on the city in Latin America, and enjoys sharing her love of travel with students. She brought Skidmore students to Mexico in Summer 2003, led a Fall Seminar on Nineteenth-Century Paris in 2006, and co-taught a Travel Seminar with Prof. Viviana Rangil (Foreign Languages and Literatures), that studied Puerto Rico in the American Century in the classroom in Fall 2008 and then (literally!) got everyone’s feet wet over winter break
She is co-editor of the Central American studies journal Mesoamérica (www.mesoamericarevista.org), and the author of From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State and Federation in Central America, 1759-1839 (University of New Mexico Press, 2006) and articles in journals including Mesoamérica, Hispanic American Historical Review, and The Americas. She is co-editor of Politics, Economy and Society in Bourbon Central America (with C. Belaubre, 2007), Napoléon et les Amériques(with C. Belaubre and J. Savage, 2008; English version forthcoming with Brill Press, 2010) and Mapping Latin America; Space and Society, 1492-2000 (with K. Offen, University of Oklahoma, 2010).
Please click onto the link for further information on Jordana Dym.
http://www.skidmore.edu/~jdym/
