The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law

Menu

Katherine M. Marino

Associate Professor of History
Affiliated Faculty of Latin American Studies

Katherine M. Marino’s research and teaching interests include twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American history; histories of women, gender, sexuality, and race in the Americas; human rights; U.S. empire, and transnational feminism. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Gender & History, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.

Her first book, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2019), is a history of Pan-American feminism, a movement uniting leaders and groups throughout the Americas over the first half of the twentieth century. The book argues that Latin American and Caribbean activists were at the vanguard of global feminism and human rights. They promoted a “feminismo americano” encompassing women’s political and civil equality, social and economic justice, anti-imperialism, and in the 1930s and 40s, anti-fascism and anti-racism. At the 1945 United Nations conference in San Francisco, this movement helped enshrine women’s rights and human rights in the UN Charter. The book received the Latin American Studies Association Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award for an outstanding book on Latin American foreign policies and international relations, the WAWH Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award for best publication which illustrates the use of a specific set of primary sources, and co-won the Ida Blom-Karen Offen Prize in Transnational Women’s and Gender History from the International Federation for Research on Women’s History. It also received Honorable Mentions for the WAWH Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for the best monograph in the field of history, and for the Organization of American Historians Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History for the most original book in U.S. women’s and/or gender history (including North America and the Caribbean prior to 1776), and was shortlisted for the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America and for the Hungtington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens’ Shapiro Book Prize for an outstanding first scholarly monograph in American political, social, intellectual, or cultural history. The book is based on her dissertation that won the Organization of American Historians Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation on U.S. women’s history. She also received the 2020 Bertha Lutz Prize from the International Studies Association, awarded to a scholar conducting the highest quality public writing and research on women in diplomacy. Her work has received support from national organizations, including the Mellon Foundation, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences where she was a Visiting Scholar in 2015-2016.