Hayley Froysland
Hayley Froysland is an Assistant Professor of History with a specialty in Latin American history. After receiving her B.A. from Hope College and M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida, she completed her doctorate in history at the University of Virginia. She is particularly interested in the connections between ideas about race, public health, charity, and nation-building and is currently revising a manuscript entitled, “'Regenerating' the Race and Nation: Charity, Morality, and Public Health in Bogotá, Colombia, 1850-1936.”
Recent Course Offerings
Colonial Latin American History (Latin American Culture and Civilization I
This course will outline the broad political, economic, cultural, and social organization of colonial Latin America and connect these larger structures to the human experience. We will begin with the clash between the cultures of European conquerors and native peoples in the Americas and consider how some advanced native civilizations, such as the Aztecs, collapsed so rapidly. Central to the course will be an analysis of the interaction of the indigenous populations, Europeans, African slaves, and people of mixed blood and the extent to which cultural elements of each group contributed to the formation of a distinct society. We will examine the establishment of empire and analyze how elites were able to maintain a relatively stable social and political order throughout the period and how this control or hegemony was sometimes challenged and sometimes perpetuated by those below. In answering this question we will consider labor systems (including slavery), the role of the church, family life, and hierarchical relationships based on race, class, and gender. The course will end with an examination of the movements for independence from Spain and Portugal and an analysis of the colonial legacies that would affect the political, economic, and social development of Latin American societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course format will involve lectures, films, and discussions of the reading material.
Modern Latin American History (Latin American Culture and Civilization II)
This course will survey the political, economic, social, and cultural history of Latin America. It will connect the larger processes of political and economic organization to individual human experiences. We will focus on the processes of nation-building and modernization in the 19th and 20th centuries and the interplay between democracy and economic development that was based on agro-exports in the context of dependency. We will consider the effects of these processes on people of various classes, races, and genders. We will consider the challenges to elite-led “modernization” and analyze the process by which various groups of people (urban workers, indigenous peasants, students, women, etc.) sought to participate in, create, and benefit from the societies in which they lived after a long history of having been largely excluded from effective “citizenship.” Sometimes conflicting ideologies and objectives culminated in violent confrontations. We will examine some of these, including the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions. Some central themes, then, include: urban and rural life, an export-oriented economy, the rich and poor, the growth of the middle classes, reform, ethnicity and race, political structures, ideology, development, democracy, violence, and U.S.-Latin American relations. The latter theme is important, as the United States and Latin America have been historically tied in a number of ways, a process which has even intensified in recent years.
Poverty, Race, Bodies, and Disease: Public Health and Nation-Building in Modern Latin American History
This course will consider the questions of nation-building and development in Latin America by using an interdisciplinary approach. As the nations became more urban and modern, many of the elite were increasingly preoccupied about the poor and what they deemed as racial “degenerates” in mixed-race societies. They often used metaphors of the body to refer to what they perceived as “degenerating” national bodies. They felt a dire need to address moral and physical “ills” in order to progress. In this course, we will examine the role of doctors and medicine in history and society. In particular, we will seek to understand ideas and theories about disease not as purely objective and based on scientific “facts,” but as changing, controversial, and shaped by their local, cultural, social, and historical contexts. Thus, we will also examine historical ideas about and connections between poverty, race, gender, disease, citizenship, and nation. The instructor will lecture occasionally to provide background information, but the course will be based on discussions of the reading material. Students will also complete several short writing assignments.
Revolution and Reaction in Latin America
This course is a capstone course for History and Social Studies majors. In this course we will examine the major revolutions of twentieth century Latin America, including the Mexican Revolution and the Cuban Revolution. We will also consider the guerrilla struggles in various countries beginning in the 1960s and the "counter-revolutions" of the 1970s and 1980s, as various Latin American dictators led a "dirty war" against those they deemed as insurgents. We will also explore the involvement of the United States in the violent contests of its neighbors to the South. Though we will examine revolutionary theories, such as the foco theory developed by Che Guevara and Regis Debray, our focus will not be on military strategies and battles. Primary themes will include ideology, the role of religion in revolutions, social class disparities, questions of order and democracy in Latin America, and U.S.-Latin American relations. The course format will be based primarily on discussion of books and student research. Students will “do history” as they engage in primary research and write a significant research paper.
Recent Publications
"La regeneración de la raza: Nation-Building and the Shaping of National Character in
Colombia, 1884-1930,” Chapter in Don Doyle and Marco Pamplona, eds., Nationalism in the Americas (Forthcoming by University of Georgia Press, 2006; also to be translated
and published in Brazil and Argentina)
"'National Health is National Wealth': Doctors, Leprosy, and the Social Body in
Colombia,1870-1899," Forthcoming in Thomas Smith, ed., Public Health and Social Control in Latin America
Review of Teresita Martínez-Vergne, Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico (University of Texas Press, 1999).
Published in Fronteras de la historia, Vol. 5 (2000)
“Caridad, asistencia pública y moralización: El mantenimiento de un orden social paternalista y jerárquico en Colombia, 1850-1940.” Memoria y Sociedad, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Nov. 1997)
Recent Conference Presentations
“Disease, Degeneration, and Death: Doctors, the State, and the Nation-Building Project in Colombia, 1886-1936,” Paper presented at the American Historical Association Conference, Seattle, January 2005
“Order and Progress: The Moral Question in Regeneration Colombia,” Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association conference, Las Vegas, October 7-10, 2004
“Charity, Morality, and Nation: Regenerating the Social Organism in ‘Regeneration’ Colombia, 1884-1904,” Paper presented at the American Historical Association meeting, Washington, D.C., January, 2004
"La regeneración de la raza: Nation-Building and the Shaping of National Character in
Colombia, 1884-1930," Paper presented at the conference on "Nationalism in the New
World: The Americas and the Atlantic World, c1776-1919," Vanderbilt University, Nashville, October 9-11, 2003 and at the 51st annual International Congress of Americanists (ICA), Santiago, Chile, July 13-18, 2003
Panel Organizer and Presenter, "From the Streets of Degeneration to the Homes of
Regeneration: Morality, Charity, Citizenship, and Nation in Colombia, 1870-1930,"
Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Conference, Dallas, March 27-29, 2003
"'National Health is National Wealth': Leprosy and the Social Body, 1870-1936," Paper
presented at the American Historical Association, Chicago, January 2-5, 2003
“From Prostitute to Mother and Vagrant to Citizen: Charity, Morality, and Progress in Bogotá, Colombia, 1870-1936,” Paper presented at the Urban History Association Conference, Pittsburgh, September 26-28, 2002
"Public Health, Charity, and Moral Reform: The Social Dimensions of Nation Formation in Colombia, 1870-1930," American Historical Association, San Francisco, January 3-6, 2002
