Mariana Katz

Mariana Katz is a PhD candidate in History at Columbia University. Her dissertation explores the relationship between state formation and regimes of unfree labor in postcolonial Latin America, with a focus on nineteenth-century Paraguay. Her research, funded by the Social Science Research Council, lies at the intersection of the history of popular politics, the social history of labor, comparative slavery studies, and the scholarship on state making. Prior to starting her graduate studies, Mariana studied history at the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, and conducted research on the history of workers and artisans in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. She has been involved in different public history initiatives, including working as a researcher and exhibition curator at the Museo Nacional del Cabildo in Buenos Aires and co-creating the podcast series The Sounds of Calibán: A History of Latin America through Music. At Columbia, she collaborates with with Separated: An Oral History Project, which documents the experiences of families separated by the Trump Administration’s Zero Tolerance Policy.