Elizabeth Oglesby

Associate Professor of Geography and Latin American Studies

Elizabeth Oglesby, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Geography and of Latin American Studies at UA.  Her specializations include globalization and labor issues, human rights, and Central America, especially Guatemala.  She received her Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley.  

Dr. Oglesby is a critical human geographer with a broad inter-disciplinary appreciation. Her academic work has focused on state violence, forced displacement, political economy, human rights, and memory, particularly in Central America. She is co-editor of The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2011) and Guatemala: The Question of Genocide (Routledge, 2018), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Recently, she has been writing on Central American migration and U.S. border policy in venues such as The Nation, The Hill, The Conversation, Salon, Truthout and others directed at a U.S. public audience.

Her professional experience in Latin American issues includes working as editor of Central America Report in Guatemala City, as Associate Editor of NACLA Report on the Americas, and as a researcher with the Guatemalan Truth Commission following Guatemala's peace accords (1997-1999). In 2013 and 2918, she testified as an expert witness in the genocide trials against retired general José Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala City.

Dr, Oglesby teaches classes in Latin American and global human rights, international development, borders, refugees, and migration, and research methods, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and social theory at the graduate level. She advises students researching a range of issues across the hemisphere and beyond. She also coordinates the University of Arizona Guatemala study abroad program in collaboration with colleagues from the Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences in Guatemala City.

She is the recipient of the Gilbert White Public Service Honors from the American Association of Geographers, as well as an Outstanding Mentor Award from the University of Arizona’s Honors College, and an Outstanding Upper Division Teaching Award from the UArizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

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