Katherine M. Marino

Portrait of Katherine M. Marino
Image Credit: Martha Stewart

Katherine M. Marino is an associate professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research and teaching explore histories of women, gender, sexuality, and race in the U.S. and Latin America; human rights; and transnational feminism. She is the author of Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (2019), which is based on her dissertation that won the OAH Lerner-Scott Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. women's history. Her book won the 2020 Latin American Studies Association Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award, the 2020 Western Association of Women Historians (WAWH) Barbara "Penny" Kanner Award, and co-won the 2020 International Federation for Research on Women's History Ida Blom-Karen Offen Prize in Transnational Women's and Gender History. It also received Honorable Mentions for the 2020 WAWH Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize and for the 2020 OAH Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women's and/or Gender History, and was shortlisted for the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. She is the co-winner of the 2020 Bertha Lutz Prize from the International Studies Association for writing on women in diplomacy. Her work has received support from national organizations, including the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences where she was a Visiting Scholar. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Women's History, Gender & History, Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, as well as in popular media outlets, including the Washington Post.

Featured Lecture

OAH Lectures

This lecture explains how feminists around the world have pioneered international standards in women's rights and human rights from the early twentieth century to today. The lecture begins with the U.S. and Latin American feminists who innovated women's rights treaties and were critical to pushing women's and human rights into the 1945 United Nations Charter. It details the continuing work of feminists, especially those from global south, to promoting women's rights in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It connects the work of global feminist groups during the Cold War years, the transnational feminist mobilizations of the 1970s and 80s, and the popularization of the idea in the 1990s that "women's rights are human rights."
This lecture explores Pan-American feminism, a movement that united activists from the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean over the first half of the twentieth century. This movement helped achieve women's suffrage, as well as women's civil, social, and economic rights, throughout the Americas. It also pioneered international standards in women's rights that laid the direct groundwork for international human rights in the 1930s and 40s. The talk explores some of the key figures who drove Pan-American feminism from Brazil, Cuba, Panama, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, and the United States. It explains how Latin American feminists' work against U.S. imperialism profoundly shaped the movement and helped lead to its most significant accomplishments.
This lecture recasts the U.S. suffrage movement through an international lens. It explores how U.S. suffrage advocates collaborated with other activists across national borders and were often themselves from other countries. It demonstrates the importance of international organizations, conferences, and publications that in turn spread information, ideas, and strategies. It also underscores how the shifting position of the U.S. in the world from the 19th to 20th centuries, influenced suffrage activism. Casting new light on some familiar figures and bringing less well-known ones to life, this talk underscores that the U.S. suffrage movement relied on transnational support in order to thrive.