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Dr Thomas Rath                                                       

Lecturer in Latin American History

Office: 311, 26 Gordon Square
Office hour: Mondays 11-12:30
External phone: 0207 679 3634
Internal phone: 33634
E-mail: t.rath@ucl.ac.uk

I was an undergraduate in the UCL History department, then went to Oxford for their M.Phil. in Latin American Studies, and after that to Columbia for a Ph.D., awarded in 2009. Since then I have held a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Maryland, College Park, and then a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Hamilton College in New York. 

I work on the political, social and cultural history of modern Latin America, particularly Mexico. In 2013 my study of demilitarization in postrevolutionary Mexico will be published by the University of North Carolina Press. I am currently working on several projects: a political and environmental history of the U.S.-Mexican campaign against foot-and-mouth disease (aftosa) in the 1940s and 50s; a study of masculinity and politics in postrevolutionary Mexico; a political biography of General Bonifacio Salinas Leal. I am also developing a comparative study of historical memory, democratization, and demilitarization in Latin America.                                               

Select Publications:     

Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960 (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 

“ ‘Que el cielo un soldado en cada hijo te dio…’: Conscription, Recalcitrance and Resistance in Mexico in the 1940s.” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 507-531.                                                                                              

“Revolutionary Citizenship Against Institutional Inertia: Cardenismo and the Mexican Army, 1934-40.” In Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico, eds. Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012).