Angélica Márquez-Osuna
Email: amarquezosuna@luc.eduPronouns:
Position: Assistant Professor
Institutional Affiliation: Loyola University Chicago
Department: History
Regions of Interest: All Latin America and the Caribbean, LAC in the World
Time Periods: Late colonial/Independence Era, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century
Subareas: Agriculture, Environment, Natural Sciences, Technology
Keywords:
PhD, History of Science, Harvard University, 2023
MA, History, University of California Santa Barbara, 2016
MA, Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatan, 2014
Positions Held:
Assistant Professor, History Department, Loyola University Chicago, 2024-
Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, 2023-2024
About Me:
Angélica Márquez-Osuna is an Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. Her research and courses focus on Latin American history.
Márquez-Osuna’s first book project, ArcHives of Persistence. The History of Beekeeping in Tropical Americas, is an environmental history that reconstructs how bees have thrived, declined, and endured in the Americas and the active role beekeepers have played in these processes. It focuses on the case of the Yucatán Peninsula, México, and its connections with Florida and the Caribbean. This book explores how and why, after three centuries of experimentation in the Americas, the introduced honeybee has become the most widespread bee on the continent, and the consequences of industrial beekeeping in tropical environments. ArcHives of Persistence offers an innovative perspective on animal studies and contributes to debates on environmental change, the unfixed role of species in agricultural systems, and tropical commodity histories.
Márquez-Osuna was a 2023-2024 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program at Harvard University. Her research has been supported by several grants and awards, including the Latin American Studies Association (LASA); Plett Historical Research Foundation; Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University (DRCLAS); and UC MEXUS – CONACYT (University of California Institute for México and the United States – CONACYT).
Her dissertation “Innovation in the Tropics: The Persistence of Beekeeping Knowledge in the Yucatan Peninsula, 1780-1950” (Harvard, 2023) received the 2024 Gilbert Fite Dissertation Award from the Agricultural History Society, and the 2024 Science and Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean (SKLAC) Dissertation Prize.
Books:
“Revolución en la colmena: la llegada de la abeja con aguijón a la Península de Yucatán y el Nacimiento de la apicultura tropical en el siglo XX,” in El Ascenso Maderista y el fin del Régimen Porfiriano, Fernando Pérez Montesinos, Tatiana Pérez Ramírez and Edgar Urbina Sebastián (Coord.), Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revoluciones de México and Colegio Mexiquense, June 2024. https://www.inehrm.gob.mx/recursos/Libros/2025_independencia_judicial_y_definicion_deatribuciones.pdf
Articles:
“Beekeeping from the Southern Frontier: The Yucatán Peninsula’s Industrious Bee and the Birth of Modern Apiculture in the 19th century,” Agricultural History, February 2024. https://read.dukeupress.edu/agricultural-history/article/98/1/23/386138/Beekeeping-from-the-SouthThe-Yucatan-Peninsula-s?guestAccessKey=d2e0edbf-8098-4746-95c3-4867df21de50
“Colmenas en expansión: la historia de la apicultura moderna en la frontera tropical durante la primera mitad del siglo XX,” Istor, special issue, June 2024. http://ecos.cide.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/02-Istor-94-Angelica-Marquez-Osuna-pp-9-29.pdf
“A Journey to the Universe of Bees: From the Archives to the Fields,” ReVista (Cambridge), 22(2), Winter 2023, 1-7. http://search.proquest.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/scholarly-journals/journey-universe-bees/docview/2785662820/se-2
Other Media and Projects:
Exploring Commodity Frontiers, with Sven Beckert, Myles Lennon, Angélica Márquez-Osuna, and Rachel Steely
Online CV: View here