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Assistant Professor of History, Northwestern University

Lina Britto is a Colombian journalist and historian who teaches Latin American and Caribbean History at Northwestern University. She received a PhD in History from New York University (2013), and was a postdoctoral and faculty fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University (2013-2014, and 2016-2017). She was awarded grants from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Her work was been published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, NACLA, El Espectador (Colombia), among others. Her book Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise came out in spring 2020 with University of California Press. She’s currently working on her second book project on the role of medicine, science and technology in the violent transition that her hometown Medellin, Colombia, underwent during the second half of the twentieth century, when it became the epicenter of the cocaine industry in the Americas and one of the murder capitals of the world.

Experience

  • –present
    Assistant Professor of History (Associate Professor of History as of September 1, 2020), Northwestern University

Education

  • 2013 
    New York University, PhD/ History