Heather Vrana is Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida (Ph.D, Indiana University 2013) and author of the monograph, This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996 (University of California Press, 2017) and editor of the anthology Anti-Colonial Texts from Central American Student Movements, 1929-1983, a collection of primary sources from Central American student movements (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). With co-editor Julie Gibbings, Vrana edited Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2020). Their articles and reviews have appeared in the American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Radical History Review, Journal of Genocide Research, Ethnohistory, e-misférica, and Journal of Latin American Geography.

They are editor for History of the Latin American Research Review and and serve on several faculty editorial boards for academic presses, including the University of Florida Press, the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América de la Universidad de Costa Rica, and the “Bodies and Ecologies: Histories of Health, Environment, and Medicine in Latin America and the Caribbean” series at the University of Nebraska Press. Since 2010, they have been involved with the Tepoztlán Collective.

Their current research is entitled Guerrilla Medicine and Disability in Cold War Central America, part of a broader turn toward disability history in the region. They are currently co-editing New Histories of Disability in Latin America with David Carey, Jr.

Their research interests include disability, guerrilla medicine, student and social movements, Central America, social class, race, and the history of medicine.

Heather Vrana learned Spanish in a Washington D.C.-area high school from a Puerto Rican nationalist and three children of refugees from internal conflicts in Central America and Peru. From this language education came a political education. After some unexpected delays and misdirections, they enrolled in Latin American history and political science classes in college. With guidance from tremendous mentors, they journeyed to the Midwest for graduate school. After graduate school, they taught at Southern Connecticut State University and, later, at the University of Florida.

Heather Vrana
hvrana@ufl.edu