New Postdoctoral Fellow Patricia Lopez

Tish Lopez is a postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography.  Her work emerges at the intersections of health and development, citizenship, and militarism. In particular, she investigates the ways in which citizenship, through health and development and military interventions, has been transnationalized, or, unmoored from its traditional framing through the state. While health and development programs are often understood to be apolitical, in her work, she argues that they are deeply political and disrupt citizens’ rights to make claims on or through their own governments. The majority of her work has focused on U.S. and international military interventions in Haiti over the past 100 years, with special focus on the first occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the immediate aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. She is currently finalizing a co-edited volume with Kathryn A. Gillespie, called Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death, which explores how uneven hierarchies of power operate through economic processes of commodification and capital accumulation making lives (both nonhuman animal and human) killable, and exploiting bodies, lives, and labor in ways that bring on premature death.

She is excited to be at Dartmouth, and is looking forward to teaching GEOG 17, Geopolitics and Third World Development this Spring.