Polly Lauer

Polly Lauer is a doctoral candidate in modern Latin American History. She researches Indigenous media from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Her dissertation, “Struggling for Air: The Politics of Resilience in a Maya K’iche’ Radio Station, 1959-2020,” examines the history of the oldest Maya K’iche’ radio station in Guatemala. This interdisciplinary project draws on ethnographic and archival sources to illustrate how Indigenous actors wielded communications technologies to defend language, community, and autonomy through periods of extreme violence and repression. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the Tinker Foundation, the MacMillan Center, and the Yale History Department. 

 

At Yale, Polly has coordinated the Program in Agrarian Studies, the Indigenous Epistemologies from Latin America Speaker Series, the Latin American History Speaker Series, the Approaches to Recent and Contemporary History Working Group, and the Latin American Studies Working Group. She is also an active member of a K’iche’ language conversation group. She graduated summa cum laude from the College of William & Mary with a B.A. in History and Latin American Studies.