Ana Calderon

Ana Calderón is a PhD candidate in Global History, specializing in transnational US and Latin America. Her dissertation, titled “La Gran Sociedad: War on Poverty, Colonialism and the Remaking of Development after WWII,” explores how ideas and practices about development were formed, negotiated, and contested in Puerto Rico between 1942-1975. She argues that practices now associated with neoliberal governance–privatization of state enterprises, retrenchment of the welfare state, rise of the nonprofit sector–date back to Puerto Rico’s industrialization. Her project recently received the sole Honorable Mention for the Marilyn Young Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Ana previously served as a coordinator for the International History Workshop and worked as a researcher for the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. For the 2024-2024 academic year, she will be a graduate research assistant for the Yale Center for British Art Archives.

Before coming to Yale, Ana received her BA in History from Rutgers University and spent several years as a graduate student in her native San Juan. Her research has been generously supported by the MacMillan Center, International Security Studies, John Enders Foundation and the History Department. Ana’s writing on Puerto Rico has been published in Global Voices and the University of Puerto Rico’s interdisciplinary journal Revista Umbral. Students interested in the PhD program are welcomed to contact her.