Coleman, Kevin P.

Kevin Coleman is a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in the history of U.S.-Latin American encounters and visual culture. He is currently working on a history of photography and political culture in a banana-company town on the Caribbean Coast of Central America. Based on extensive research in traditional archives and neglected visual archives in Honduras and the United States, this project examines how campesinos (subsistence farmers), workers, and women used photography to expose injustice and to posit more equitable social relations.

Similar issues animate his teaching. Coleman offers surveys of Latin American history and advanced undergraduate seminars organized around a variety of themes, including the development of popular political cultures and nation-state formation, religion and the region’s encounter with the United States. His graduate offerings examine the role that photography and other visual technologies have played in shaping understandings of self, nation, and race in several national and transnational contexts.

Coleman’s research and teaching interests derive in part from the years that he spent working alongside people who were trying to get some good things done in their communities. Before pursuing graduate studies, he taught introductory philosophy classes at Navajo Community College in New Mexico. He then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern Honduras, living and working with campesinos and developing friendships that continue to this day. The years that he spent with his sleeves rolled up continue to inform his research and teaching.