Elena Jackson Albarrán

Dr. Albarrán teaches courses in modern Latin American history, specializing in themes of comparative histories of childhood (Latin American, world, and Cold War), revolutions, popular culture, and capitalism. She was awarded the Conference of Latin American Historians Teaching Award in 2024, and the Miami University College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Educator Award in 2020.

As a scholar, Dr. Albarrán is a cultural historian of twentieth-century Mexico and the history of childhood. She is the author of Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill 2024), and Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Univerisity of Nebraska Press 2015). She is co-editor and contributor to the volume Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 2012). She has examined the methodological challenges faced by childhood scholars through a critical analysis of her own childhood diary in a chapter contribution to the volume Children as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Approaches to Research in a Global Context (Palgrave MacMillan 2021). Her research on the intersections of national and transitional youth identities through the Mexican Boy Scouts appears in the volume Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave MacMillan 2015). Her work on the rhetorical construction of the proletarian child in Mexico as a national ideal was published as a chapter in the collection Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme, and Power (University of Arizona Press 2015).

Albarrán is a founding member of the Latin American childhood scholars' network Red de Historiadores de las Infancias de América Latina (REHIAL). Her long-term collaborations with scholars of childhood are reflected in her contributions to the collection Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, and Agents: Approaches to Research in a Global Contex (Palgrave MacMillan 2021: the edited volume Infâncias y juventudes no século XX: histórias latino-americanas (Editora Todapalavra, 2018); and the multivalent project Re-Connect/Re-Collect (University of Tampere, Finland, ongoing.)