Jennifer Lambe (PhD, Yale University; AB, Brown University) is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history. Lambe's work, which has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, and the Cuban Heritage Collection, explores the intersection between political history, intellectual history, and popular culture.
Lambe's first book, Madhouse: Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History, was published with the University of North Carolina Press (2017). Madhouse traces the history of mental illness and mental healing in Cuba through the Mazorra Mental Asylum, the only public psychiatric hospital in Cuba until the 1959 Revolution and a key site of political intervention and social reform. She is also co-editor with Michael Bustamante (University of Miami) of The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959-1980, published with Duke University Press (2019).
Lambe's second book, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (forthcoming in fall 2024 with the University of North Carolina Press), centers the interface between political and popular culture in the domestic and international reception of the Cuban Revolution. From television to travel bans, Cold War experts to popular dance, the book explores how knowledge about the Revolution was produced and how the Revolution in turn shaped new worldviews.
Lambe also directs a digital humanities project entitled "Beyond the Sugar Curtain: Tracing Cuba-U.S. Connections since 1959." The initiative seeks to contextualize the volatile diplomatic tides of the last decade by exploring the past and present of travel and encounter between the two nations. Pushing beyond depictions of a "sugar curtain" or "emotional embargo," this project features spaces and moments of connection in the post-1959 period, including but not limited to those between the United States and Cuba.
