Emily Snyder
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
Emily Snyder received a Greenleaf Visiting Scholar award in 2020 to support research for her dissertation, “Untangling Revolutions: Cuba, Nicaragua, and the United States in the Cold War Caribbean, 1979-1990.” At the time of the award, she was a PhD Candidate in Latin American and Caribbean History at Yale University.
Snyder’s research focuses on twentieth-century revolutions and the intersection between their local and international dynamics. Her broader interests include the Latin American Cold War, gender studies, and Indigenous politics in Central America. Her work can be found in Cuban Studies, The Radical History Review, and forthcoming in The Americas.
Title of Research : Dissertation Research
At UNM, Snyder will examine collections to further her dissertation research. The project's overarching objective is to excavate the connections between the Cuban and Sandinista Revolutions and to examine the (counter)revolutionary consequences they produced. Margaret Randall embodies one such link: she lived in Cuba from 1969-1980, and then moved to Nicaragua once the Sandinistas triumphed. Snyder uses lenses of gender and sexuality to analyze Cuban internationalism and delineate how it shaped women’s lives, marriage, and the family. Randall’s unique position as a North American internationalist granted her privileged access within both revolutions, and her documentarian skills produced records of everyday experiences of revolution, particularly those of women. Snyder will examine the Margaret Randall Papers and Margaret Randall Photograph Collection to access records of her life under both revolutions, how she understood Cuba’s shift towards internationalism in the late 1970s in Cuba, and how she made sense of the Cuban-Nicaraguan relationship in the 1980s. Snyder also plans to consult the David Craven Papers and the Central American Political Ephemera Collection.
