Willie Hiatt

Willie Hiatt is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at Long Island University, Post Campus. His research focuses on the relationship between technology and modernity in Latin America, particularly the ways in which people use and understand technological artifacts to construct modern identities and historical narratives. His book, "The Rarified Air of the Modern: Aviation and Technological Modernity in the Andes" (Oxford University Press, 2016), is a social and cultural history that examines how airplanes inspired a new sense of national possibility in a self-perceived backward Andean country. He is currently working on an oral history of how Peruvians experienced electrical blackouts (apagones) during the Sendero Luminoso revolutionary period (1980-2000).