I have been interested in Latin American political and social history since I have memory. As a historian, I directed this interest towards the study of “populism” a political identity often associated with the region’s modern history. Two of my books explore the history of populism. Ambassadors of the Working Class tells the story of the “worker attachés,” labor activists appointed by Argentine president Juan Perón since 1946 in all embassies with the mission of spreading the gospel of Peronism worldwide. It’s a social and political history that delves into how populism challenged the postwar status quo, and with the limitations of those challenges. In Breve Historia del Antipopulismo, I study “the other side of the story”: the basic tropes of antipopulist rhetoric in Argentine history.  

While I was at it, I kept finding a persistent reliance of antipopulist discourses on animal metaphors in order to deride popular subjects and their behavior. “Animals,” "beasts” “pack of wolves,” “lambs”, “monkeys”. This realization turned my attention to the animal world and how we perceive it and interpret it, which is been my interest for the last decade, within the larger field of environmental humanities and multispecies history of capitalism.

The immediate materialization of this interest is DARKLAX, a project funded by the Research Council of Norway focused on a interdisciplinary history of salmon farming in Chile from a transnational perspective and a particular focus on the role of Norway. I’ll be in charge of the project until 2029, working with biologists, philosophers, filmmakers, activists and journalists across the globe. 

If I were to choose, I would rather just write. Partly because of that, I have published articles and essays related to my research interests in several different journals, newspapers and magazines throughout the years (see list of publications). Some other times I am the object of other colleague’s essays, as in this comprehensive piece on salmon farming in the Aftenposten. And on a few occasions, I reluctantly dabble into podcasts, radio and streaming programs, talking about salmon, populism or contemporary politics.

At the Spanish section of the Department of Foreign Languages, I teach Latin American history for all levels of undergraduate and master students. Occasionally, I collaborate with some of our wonderful colleagues in the humanities; from a class about the Haitian Revolution in Professor Sara Hamilton’s history course, to a history of oil and petrocultures as part of Tina Paphitis’ Introduction to Environmental Humanities.

But the most successful class I have taught so far is our SPLA 109, “A History of Latin America Through Food.” That we ate Latin American-related food every week and managed to visit stores with some of the best regional food in Bergen was just part of the appeal, though enough to get some coverage!

Academic and Essay Books

Breve historia del antipopulismo. Los intentos por domesticar a la Argentina plebeya, de 1801 a Macri. Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI Editores, July, 2021.

Ambassadors of the Working Class: Argentina's International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017

Hecho Burgués, País Maldito {The Bourgeois Fact, the Cursed Country]  Buenos Aires: Aurelia Rivera, 2016.

Educando a Fernando. Cómo se Construyó De la Rúa Presidente [Educating Fernando. How De la Rúa Became President], Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta, 1999.

Fiction

Acá Falta Alguien [Someone is Missing]. Buenos Aires: Aurelia Rivera, 2024.

Soy Un Bravo Piloto de la Nueva China [A Courageous Pilot of the New China]. Buenos Aires: Random House-Mondadori, 2011

Todo lo Sólido [All That Is Solid] Buenos Aires: Aurelia Rivera, 2007

La Última Cena de José Stalin [The Last Supper of Joseph Stalin] Buenos Aires: Aurelia Rivera, 2006

Selected chapters, articles

“When a Salmon Strays”, The New York Review of Books Online, October 15, 2025.

“With or Without Oil: Nordsjøen and the Persistence of Norwegian Exceptionalism” Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, Vol. 16 No 2 (2025)

“Hijos del 2001: Los inmigrante argentios en Noruega y los usos de la experiencia histórica”, in Roxana Sobrino y Alissa Vik (eds) América Latina en Noruega, De Gruyter, October, 2025.

“Argentina: Into the Abyss”, The New York Review of Books, March 15, 2024. 

“The Etymology of Despair in the Americas”, International Labor and Working-Class History, ii, 58-65. Cambridge University Press: 12 October, 2020.

“Guinartism: on Don Quixote, caudillos, and political imagination in Latin America”, in Bezio, Kristin M.S. and Goethals, George R., Leadership, Populism and Resistance. Jepson Studies in Leadership series. Chapter 3, pp. 46-69. Chelterham: Edward Elgar P

“’Otra película de negros’. Cultura de masas y la larga guerra por el excepcionalismo nacional en América”, in Prismas. Revista de Historia Intelectual de la Universidad de Quilmes. Dossier: Guerra Fría Cultural en América Latina. N. 23, pp. 197-203. 2019

Populism is not in the air (but maybe it should be). International Labor and Working-Class History        (ILWCH), Cambridge University Press and Columbia University History Department, Volume  93, Spring 2018

“Populismo y Propiedad Privada: El Genoma de la Guerra Fría en América Latina” in Martín Plot (ed.), Destino Sudamericano. Ideas e Imágenes Políticas del Segundo Siglo Argentino y Americano. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universidad de Belgrano, 2010, pp. 153-176

“Neither/Nor. Mapping Latin American's Response to Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism” (with Martín Plot) Constellations, 14, no. 3 (2007): 86-111

“Political Dimensions of the Crisis” in Michael Cohen and Margarita Gutman (eds.), Argentina in Collapse. The Americas Debate. New York: The New School, 2002

Selected Interviews and dissemination articles:

“Ein giftig bumerang”, Klassekampen, March 4, 2023. 

“Argentina 1985: Comienzo y Final de un Régimen Político”, El País, November 6, 2022. 

«Más que polarización, lo que hay en Argentina es una clara radicalización de la derecha», intreview, Diario El País, Madrid, 22 August, 2022. 

“In Chile and Argentina, anti-populist politics is failing”, Financial Times, October 30, 2019.  

“Comparing Trump with Latin American Authoritarians Reveals a Dangerous Understanding of Democracy”, The Washington Post, February 20, 2018. 

"What Obama Should Know About Macri's Argentina," (with Gastón Chillier), The New York Times, March 23, 2016 

"Los Juguetes no son tuyos," in Jordana Blejmar, Silvana Mandolessi and Mariana Eva Perez, eds. El Pasado Inasequible. Desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo milenio. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, June 2018.

"Democracy in the Americas, the Revolutionary Way," NACLA Report on the Americas, February 8, 2017. 

"La Startup Americana," Anfibia, Buenos Aires, September 25, 2016.

"The Taming of the Argentine Right," NACLA Report on the Americas, December 2, 2015. http://nacla.org/news/2015/12/02/taming-argentine-right

"The Torture Consensus in U.S. Democracy," NACLA Report on the Americas, December 19, 2014. https://nacla.org/news/2014/12/19/torture-consensus-us-democracy

“Down, Argentine Way” (with Mark Healey) American Prospect 13, no. 2 (Jan 2002) 

“The Cost of Orthodoxy” (with Mark Healey) American Prospect 13, supplement (Feb 2002)

Selected Reviews

John Soluri, Creatures of Fashion. Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia. In Journal of Social History, March 27, 2025. 

Fernando Teixeira da Silva, Alexandre Fortes, Thomas D. Rogers and Gillian McGillivray (eds), The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States. Hispanic American Historical Review (2025) 105 (3): 599–600. 

Eric Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties. In Prismas, Revista de Historia Intelectual, Vol. 25, Issue 1, 2021.

Patricio Simonetto, El dinero no es todo: Compra y venta de sexo en la Argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2019). In Journal of Latin American Studies. Vol 53. Issue 2, May 2021.

Ignacio Aguiló, The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018). In Journal of Latin American Studies, Volume 52, Issue 2, May 2020.

Francine Masiello: Senses of Democracy. Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. In Iberoamericana. Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. 48 (1) pp. 146-147 (2019)

Ezequiel Adamovsky and Esteban Buch: La marchita, el escudo y el bombo: Una historia cultural de los emblemas del peronismo, de Perón a Cristina Kirchner. Buenos Aires. Grupo Planeta, 2016. In Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol 51 N 1, (2019)

Patricio Simonetto, Entre la injuria y la revolución: El Frente de Liberación Homosexual, Argentina, 1967-1976 (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Quilmes, 2017). In Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol 50, Issue 4, Nov. 2018.

Paula Canelo. La política secreta de la última dictadura argentina (1976-1983). Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2016. In Journal of Latin American Studies, (2017)

Loris Zanatta, La internacional justicialista: Auge y ocaso de los sueños imperiales de Perón Translated by Carlos Catroppi. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2013. In Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 95, no. 4 (November 2015)

“Patrick J. Iber, ’Who Will Impose Democracy?’: Sacha Volman and the Contradictions of CIA Support for the Anticommunist Left in Latin America.” Diplomatic History 37:5 (November 2013: 995-1028. DOI: 10.1093/dh/dht041.  

Oscar Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement: Sugar Elites, Criollo Workers, and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism, 1900–1955. In Labour/Le Travail 69 (Spring 2012) 

Other Selected Writing

“Volver”, in Signatura, 4 de diciembre de 2023. 

"Antebrazo," in Victoria Torres and Miguel Dalmaroni, eds., Golpes. Relatos y Memorias de la Dictadura. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2016

"Mao," in Me lo llevaré a la sepultura (comp.) Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba), 2016

In 2025 I obtained a FRIPRO grant from the Research Council of Norway to lead DARKLAX. The Dark Side of Sustainability: Norway and the Rise and Fall of Salmon Farming in Chile. A Transnational History of the Future (1970-2030). We will be working on this until 2029, and you can read more about it here.