Renata Keller, an associate professor of history in the ÍƼöÐÓ°ÉÔ´´’s College of Liberal Arts, recently joined a small group of faculty from around the nation to educate Congressional staff, policymakers and journalists about the history of U.S. military alliances.
Keller, an expert in modern Latin American history, the Cold War in Latin America and inter-American relations, discussed the negative impacts of informal military alliances between the United States and Latin American countries. Her expertise was sought by the American Historical Association (AHA) for the in Washington, D.C. The briefings provide historical context and help inform decisions at the highest levels.
“In Latin America, while formal military alliances have been effective, they have also been relatively rare. Informal military alliances have been more common, and those have been less effective and more harmful to the region, in part because they have less oversight, they have less consistency, and they haven't always been conducted with official state actors,” she said.
Keller felt passionate about participating as she believes historians should work to educate broad audiences.
“It is important for historians to take that responsibility seriously, to try and reach the public,” she said. “What we do in the classroom is incredibly important, but there are other audiences too. I was grateful to have the opportunity to reach some different audiences.”
Following her presentation, Keller met with members of Congress, Congressional staff and military fellows to discuss how her research related to defense, national security and other topics. She hopes to continue conversations with this group to ensure that she and other historians can actively participate in discussions about the nation’s future.
“This experience encouraged me to engage as much as possible with the public and with the government because I think a lot of people were interested in what we had to say,” she said.
One theme of Keller’s presentation is also reflected in her work as a researcher and an educator, learning history from new perspectives. Her first book, “Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution,” was one of the first of its kind to examine Mexico’s Cold War experience.
“People thought that because Mexico didn't necessarily see the same amount of violence as parts of Central America or South America, it didn't experience the Cold War,” she said. “But I did research in Mexican intelligence files and in a number of other places and found that Mexico did experience the Cold War, did fight the Cold War, but it did so in a unique way.”
Her second book, to be published in the fall of 2025, is the first hemispheric history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It looks at how people across Latin America were affected by the crisis.
“I found that there hasn't been much that looks beyond the United States and the Soviet Union. Some work has been done on Cuba, but there were other parts of the world where people were also afraid that they were about to die in a nuclear war. We just don't know much yet about what happened and how other people and governments participated in the crisis,” Keller said.
Encouraging her students to learn about history from multiple viewpoints is also an important part of Keller’s pedagogy.
“So often we teach our subjects from the U.S. perspective because we are in the United States,” she said. “I think it is good … to rethink events that [our students] might have already formed opinions on, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and show that [those events] actually involved millions and millions of people around the world.”
