Lydia Crafts

Assistant Professor , History

Courses Taught

  • HIST 150: Roots: History
  • HIST 207: United States Since 1876
  • HIST 225: Modern Latin America
  • HIST 300: Historical Methods
  • HIST 368: Formation Of U.S.Public Health
  • HIST 385: Modern America, 1930 to Present
  • Research

    My research focuses on the history of the United States in the world, Latin America, public health and medicine. I am further interested in historical memory and oral history as a methodological approach to studying the past. 

    My current book project, "'Guatemala's Tuskegee': Ethics, Experimentation, and Empire in the Circum-Caribbean" explores the history of experimentation in Guatemala. U.S. institutions and individual U.S. and Latin American researchers created a transnational research network in the twentieth century. Together they created racialized and gendered knowledge about Indigenous, women, and marginalized Guatemalans. This network enabled the experiments that Pan American Sanitary Bureau researchers carried out in the 1940s and 1950s, where they infected Guatemalans with sexually-transmitted infections (STIs).