Gema Kloppe-Santamaría

Research Area : Mexico - Central America

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Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Loyola University, Chicago. Her research deals with questions of violence, security, religion, and gender in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico and Central America. Before joining Loyola, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame University (2017–18) and Assistant Professor of International Studies at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (2015–17).

She holds a PhD in Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research and a Master in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics. Her research has been supported by several fellowships including a Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship, the Charles A. Hale Fellowship in Mexican History by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and the Women in the Humanities Fellowship by the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

She is the author of In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2020). Her work has been featured in the Latin American Research Review, The Americas, and The Journal of Latin American Studies. She has also authored reports for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center (NOREF).

In addition to her work on vigilante justice and state formation, Kloppe-Santamaría is currently working on a new project that deals with the contentious relationship between religion and violence in Mexico.

Publications