Sarah Foss

I am a historian of modern Latin America, with a focus on Central America. I am interested in approaches to history that examine how non-elite people shaped and engaged with large scale phenomena, such as development projects and international diplomacy. 

Research Interests:

My research focuses on borders and territorial disputes, histories of development, Indigeneity, and international diplomacy in modern Central America. My current book project, A Line in the Jungle: Everyday Diplomacy in the Belizean Borderlands, examines the history of the Anglo-Guatemala-Belizean territorial conflict, a case which currently sits on the docket of the International Court of Justice. My research approaches this conflict from a borderlands perspective, centering the histories of communities who daily live this reality. Using archives in Guatemala, Belize, and the U.K., I examine how borderland residents--the farmers, fishermen, merchants, local politicians, chicleros, smugglers, and loggers--shape this territorial conflict, thus placing their histories into conversation with those of Guatemalan, Belizean, British, and Maya leaderes whose diplomatic lives also shaped the contours of this issue. This research has been funded by an OSU Humanities, Arts, and Design-Based Disciplines Research Grant ($10,000) an, Oklahoma Humanities Council Grant ($3,000), and an OSU Office of the Vice President Research jumpstart/Acceleration Grant ($10,000).

I also direct the ongoing Latino Oklahoma Oral History Project, a public history initiative done in collaboration with the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program and Spanish in Rural Oklahoma Project, respectively. At the end of 2025, the LOOHP contains approximately 60 oral histories from rural and urban communities across the state and has supported multiple undergraduate and graduate student research projects. I have presented research based on this collection at the International Oral History Association meetings in 2023 and 2025, and I am finalizing a co-written manuscript (with Jorge Chavez) as a part of an invited submission as a special dossier on the Latinx Midwest to The Public Historian.

Current article projects feature a forthcoming journal article that presents an environmental history of Guatemala's 1976 earthquake and relief efforts in Chinautla, a Poqomam Maya community on the outskirts of Guatemala City (forthcoming 2026 in Hispanic American Historical Review) and an analysis of internal and international migration in Guatemala (forthcoming in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2026). I also have an article about the Philippine-based Movement for Rural Reconstruction's pilot project in Jalapa, Guatemala, under review as a part of a special issue on Genealogies of Development in Latin America, with Humanity. 

My first book, On Our Own Terms: Development and Indigeneity in Cold War Guatemala (UNC Press, 2022), focuses on the ways that Guatemalan interacted with, and often appropriated Cold War-era development projects. I focus not only on the actions and motivations of policymakers but also emphasize the ways that Indigenous people actively participated in these processes, creating alternate versions of development and Indigenous citizenship. I have also published chapters in two edited volumes, Latin America and the Global Cold War (UNC Press, 2020) and Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala (U. Texas Press, 2020). I also co-edited a special journal issue for the Journal of Social History titled "Interpretative Challenges in the Archive: Rumor, Forgery, and Denunciation in Latin America." My article which appeared in the issue, "Rumors of Insurgency and Assassination in the Ixcán, Guatemala" won the 2021 Sturgis Leavitt Award from the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies.