Denisa Jashari

Denisa Jashari is a historian of modern Latin America, focusing on twentieth century Chilean urban and social history. She is currently working on her first book manuscript tentatively titled, “Santiago’s Urban Battleground: Space and the Production of the Working Poor in Chile, 1872-1994.” The manuscript argues that the production of pobladores (poor, urban dwellers) as a social category was a fraught historical and spatial process. This category was used and mobilized both by the elites and the working poor themselves to advance political aims. It reveals the multiple historical processes that produced the urban poor, converting them over time into the central problem urban politics sought to resolve under wildly divergent political regimes from the late 19^th to the late 20^th centuries.

Blending grassroots dimensions of urban struggle with municipal and national contestations reveals as much about the political culture of the urban poor as it does about the state’s use of urban space as a tool of governance. This research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant, the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, and more.

Prior to joining Syracuse University, Jashari taught at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She was a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2020. Jashari earned a B.S. in biochemistry and Hispanic studies from Trinity College, and an M.A. in history and Latin American studies from Indiana University in Bloomington.

Modern Latin America, urban history, social history, Chile, social movements, the Cold War

Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts, 2021

Indiana University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts, 2021

College Educators Research Fellowship, UNC-Duke Consortium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University, 2021

Future Faculty Teaching Fellow at Butler University, 2019-2020

Doris G. Quinn Foundation Fellowship, 2017-2018

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 2016-2017

“The Urban and Beyond in Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 57, no. 3 (2022): 730-740.