BUFFALO, NY – Gladys I. McCormick, PhD, assistant professor at the Maxwell School of Public Affairs, Syracuse University, will speak at Canisius University as part of the fall 2015 Archives Speaker Series on Wednesday, October 21 at 4:30 p.m. in the Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library, first floor. Her lecture, entitled “The Politics of Memory in the Archive: Using Oral Histories and Intelligence Reports to Decode State Terrorism in Latin America,” is free and open to the public.
McCormick will present her archival research on political violence, drawing from declassified intelligence reports in the U.S. and Mexico, as well as oral histories, both archived and those she gathers. She will share methodologies related to using these documents to create a holistic picture of what surrounds political events and explore how historical memory can be used to popularize or mythologize political figures.
McCormick’s research interests include 19th and 20th-century Mexican history; political and economic history of Latin America and the Caribbean; comparative history; questions of historical memory and political violence; gender; and the experiences of rural peoples. Most recently, McCormick has focused on Mexico’s political prisoners and use of torture in the 1970s and the role of informants with Mexican secret police.
The fall 2015 Archives Speaker Series is sponsored by the Rev. J. Clayton Murray, SJ, Archives and Special Collections, the Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library, the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures; and the Women and Gender Studies Club.
For more information, contact Kathleen DeLaney, archivist and special collections librarian, at @email or (716) 888-8421.
Canisius University is one of 28 Jesuit universities in the nation and the premier private university in Western New York.
