Department of History

Krysta Beam

  • Graduate Student

Before coming to the University of Pittsburgh in the Fall of 2017, I received my B.A. from Greenville University in Cross-Cultural Studies and History (2013), where I wrote an undergraduate thesis on comparative magical realism in Colombia and Russia. After a year of adjunct teaching, I went on to receive an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2016), where I developed a thesis examining children’s magazines and social change in early twentieth-century Costa Rica. While at Pitt, I will be researching the history of orphanages in twentieth-century Costa Rica and collecting the stories of the people who lived in them. I am interested in questions of identity formation, social mobility, children’s agency as social and historical actors, and the role of the Liberal and Neo-liberal nation-state in child protection. I hope to contribute to the growing field of children’s history in Costa Rica under the direction of Lara Putnam.

Fields

Latin American History
Children’s History