Event Details

End: March 25, 2024
More Info: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LG4S8wpKQyaaDxYf8-dF_w

Join Eline van Ommen (Univ. of Leeds), Renata Keller (Univ. of Nevada, Reno), and Mateo Jarquín (Chapman Univ.) for a discussion on Dr. van Ommen’s book, Nicaragua Must Survive. Highlighting the importance of non-state actors in foreign relations, van Ommen sheds light on the international and transnational dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The innovative revolutionary diplomacy of the Sandinistas, she argues, created an international environment that was beneficial to the Nicaraguan Revolution and challenged the United States’ role in Central America. The role of Western Europe was crucial in this regard, shifting the inter-American balance of power – at least for the time being – in the Nicaraguan revolutionaries’ favor.

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Eline van Ommen is a Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Leeds, specializing in revolutions, transnational activism, and the Cold War in Latin America. She is the co-editor of a special issue on the international dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution for the peer-reviewed journal The Americas in 2021. Her article “The Nicaraguan Revolution's Challenge to the Monroe Doctrine: Sandinistas and Western Europe, 1979–1990,” traces the FSLN’s outreach to Western Europe in the 1980s. Van Ommen also wrote a chapter on the international campaign against Somoza in the late 1970s for the edited volume Latin America and the Global Cold War (UNC Press) in 2020. Eline van Ommen completed her PhD in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2019. Her thesis was awarded the BIHG Michael Dockrill International History Thesis prize in 2021.

Renata Keller is an associate professor of Latin American History at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received her PhD from the University of Texas in 2012, and published her first book, Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution, with Cambridge University Press in 2015. She is currently working on her second book, a hemispheric history of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which expands upon the research in her 2015 Diplomatic History article, "The Latin American Missile Crisis."

Mateo Jarquin is Assistany Professor of History at Chapman University and Co-Director of Chapman's MA Program in War, Diplomacy, and Society. He is the author of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, which comes out this May (2024) with The University of North Carolina Press. Originally from Nicaragua, Mateo holds a BA from Grinnell College and a PhD from Harvard University.