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Lina Britto

Associate Professor

Ph.D., New York University, 2013
Curriculum Vitae

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Latin American and Caribbean History

Thematic Field(s):  Gender and Sexuality History; Legal and Criminal History; Political and Policy History; War and Empire in History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Modern Latin America and the Caribbean; Drug History; 20th Century Colombia; U.S-Latin American Relations

Biography

Lina Britto (Ph.D., New York University, 2013) is a journalist and historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work situates the emergence and consolidation of illegal drug smuggling networks in Colombia and the Caribbean in the context of a growing articulation between the region and the United States during the Cold War. She is the author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020), which received an honorable mention in the category of Social Science and Humanities from the Fundación Alejandro Ángel Escobar National Book Awards (Colombia, 2021). The book was translated to Spanish and published under the title of El boom de la marihuana: Auge y caída del primer paraíso de las drogas en Colombia (Crítica and Ediciones Uniandes, 2022). She is the co-editor of two interdisciplinary volumes on histories of Colombia, from 19th to 21stcenturies, showcasing the work of more than 40 scholars teaching in Colombia, the United States, Canada and England (Routledge, 2024). She is one of the authors of Cambios y continuidades en el conflicto (Changes and Continuities in the Conflict), the second report of Colombia's Historical Commission of the Armed Conflict and Its Victims, CHCV, which was published by the Office for the High Commissioner for Peace. She is currently working on her second monograph on the American hippies that flooded the United States with marijuana in the 1970s and 1980s connecting Colombia, Jamaica and Florida in one single transnational history.

Affiliated Programs 

Publications

  • Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
  • “The Drug Wars in Colombia” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (September 2020).
  • “‘Legalización o Represión’: How a Debate in Colombia Steered the Fate of the ‘War on Drugs’” in The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 33: 1 (Spring 2019): 88-112.
  • “Hurricane Winds: Vallenato Music and Marijuana Traffic in Colombia’s First Illegal Drugs Boom” in Hispanic American Historical Review 95:1 (February 2015).
  • “El eje guajiro: Nazis, contrabandistas y diplomáticos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, Riohacha, 1940-1943” in Ricardo Oviedo, ed., Pensamiento Poscolonial. Cambio social y relaciones subalternas en América Latina (Pasto, Colombia: Universidad de Nariño, 2014).
  • “A Trafficker’s Paradise: The ‘War On Drugs’ and the New Cold War in Colombia” in Contemporánea 1:1 (2010).

Teaching Interests

Undergraduate

  • History 102: Contemporary Latin America in Historical Perspective
  • History 292: Watching Narcos: History as Entertainment
  • History 300: Cannabis: Global History
  • History 300: Making Drugs in the Americas
  • History 370: Music and Nation in Latin America
  • History 393/395: Oral History and the Archives of Terror in Latin America

Graduate

  • History 492: The Caribbean in World History
  • History 492: Histories of Colombia
  • History 420-2: Modern Latin America General Field Seminar

CREATIVE WORKS