Elizabeth Shesko

Title: Associate Professor and Director of International Studies Program
Office: 409 Varner Hall
Phone: (248) 370-3529
Fax: (248) 370-3528
Email: [email protected]

Curriculum Vitae

Education:
Ph.D., Duke University

Major Fields:
Latin American History, Race and Ethnicity

Biography:
Liz Shesko is a historian of Latin America, with a particular focus on questions of race and state formation.  Her first book looked at the role of obligatory military service on citizenship and ethnic identity in Bolivia from 1900 to 1964.  She is currently researching the culture and political participation of the officer corps in the 1940s and 1950s.  Professor Shesko regularly presents her work at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the Latin American Studies Association, and has written articles for Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, and International Labor and Working-Class-History.  She teaches a variety of courses on Latin American history and culture.  She spends a lot of time at the sidelines of her kids' sporting events and is a rabid Duke basketball fan. 

Publications:

Book 

Conscript Nation: Coercion and Citizenship in the Bolivian Barracks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

Articles and Chapters

“Shaped by Difference: The Effects of Gender and Social Class on Military Service in Bolivia.” In Conscription in the Twentieth Century: Coercion and Resistance in Global Perspective, edited by Amy J. Rutenberg. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, forthcoming November 2026.

“Arbitrary Justice: Military Tribunals in Bolivia, 1905-1945,” in Military Justice in Modern History: The Adjudication of War and Violence in a Globalising World, edited by Kelly Maddox, Tino Schölz, and Urs Matthias Zachmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025), 119-40.

“Registering Race: Inclusion and Omission in Bolivian Military-Service Records 1900-1960,” The Americas 81, no. 3 (2024): 463-487.

“The Chaco War.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Military History. Edited by Kaushik Roy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).

"'Same as Here, Same as Everywhere': Social Difference among Bolivian Prisoners in Paraguay," in The Chaco War: Environment, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, ed. Bridget María Chesterton (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 21-41.

"Mobilizing Manpower for War: Toward a New History of Bolivia's Chaco Conflict, 1932-1935," Hispanic American Historical Review 95:2 (May 2015): 299-334.

"Constructing Roads, Washing Feet, and Cutting Cane for the Patria: Building Bolivia with Military Labor, 1900-1975," International Labor and Working-Class History 80 (Fall 2011): 6-28.

“Hijos del inca. El congreso indigenal de 1945,” Fuentes. Revista de la Biblioteca y Archivo Histórico de la Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional  4, no. 6 (2010): 5-10 (La Paz, Bolivia).

Public Engagement

Fox2 Interview about Venezuela, January 5, 2026

HAHR Forum on 2019 Bolivian Election in Historical Perspective, December 2019