Katz, Mariana

Mariana is a PhD candidate. Her dissertation explores the relationship between state formation and regimes of unfree labor in postcolonial Latin America, with a focus on nineteenth-century Paraguay. The project lies at the intersection of the history of popular politics, the social history of labor, comparative slavery studies, and state-making. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, the New York Public Library, and Yale University’s Beinecke Library.

Prior to coming to Columbia, Mariana studied history at the University of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, and conducted research on the history of artisans in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. She has been involved in different public history initiatives. For two years, she worked as a researcher and exhibition curator at the Museo Nacional del Cabildo. She also co-created the podcast series The Sounds of Calibán: A History of Latin America through Music. More recently, she participated in the oral history project Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity, which documents the experiences of families forcibly separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Publications

“Slavery in an Authoritarian Republic: The Policing of Dissent and the Rise of State Slavery in Paraguay (1821–1840).” Slavery & Abolition (June 2023). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2220692

“¿ De quién son las vacas? Percepciones del Estado entre los trabajadores de las estancias de la patria (1820-1850).” In Un Estado para armar. Aproximaciones a la construcción estatal en el Paraguay, edited by Ignacio Telesca, 135-50. Buenos Aires: SB, 2024. https://www.editorialsb.com/product-page/un-estado-para-armar

“Embodying Argentina’s Origin Myth: The Cabildo of Buenos Aires from Paper to Brick,” co-written with Gabriel Di Meglio. In Iconic National Monuments and the Stories We Make them Tell, edited by Torleif Hamre, 199-230. Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2024. https://scandinavianacademicpress.no/boker/iconic-national-monuments

“Los artesanos proteccionistas. Buenos Aires, primera mitad del siglo XIX.” Economía y Política 4, no. 2 (2017): 5–36. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=6266423

Experience

Mariana has worked as Teaching Assistant for the following courses in the History Department at Columbia:

• Latin American Civilization II (spring 2021, Prof. José Moya)
• Reproducing Inequalities. Families in Latin America (fall 2020, Prof. Nara Milanich)
• Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America (spring 2020, Prof. Nara Milanich)
• History of the City in Latin America (fall 2019, Prof. Amy Chazkel)