Ariel Lambe

Associate Professor

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Ph.D., Columbia

Areas of Specialty

Latin America and the Caribbean; Cuba; social and political movements; activism; antifascism

Current Research Interests

Cuban antifascism and involvement in the Spanish Civil War; transnational movements, activism, networks, and solidarity; political exile; the 1930s in the Atlantic World; disability; madness; family history; memoir; silence

Biography

Ariel Mae Lambe (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut. At UConn’s Waterbury Campus, she teaches Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. history courses, and at UConn’s Storrs Campus, she advises and teaches M.A. and Ph.D. students. She is a scholar of Cuban political history, particularly of the Cuban republican period (1902–1958) and the history of transnational antifascism. This work culminated in her 2019 book No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, Envisioning Cuba Series). Drawing from this work, she has published and presented on various elements of the history of Cuban antifascism, including anarchist antifascism in Cuba, Masonic antifascism in Cuba, Black Cuban antifascism, Cuban medical volunteers in Spain, and the legacy of antifascism in revolutionary Cuba. She is co-editor with Dr. Melina Pappademos of Cuban Constituencies: Uncovering Political Actors in the Republic, forthcoming from University of Florida Press.

Alongside her work on Cuban political history and transnational antifascism, Dr. Lambe has gradually moved, over the past ten years, towards studying disability and madness. Her 2022 American Historical Review essay “Seeing Madness in the Archives” combined historical scholarship with genealogy and memoir to explore ways in which the historian’s mad identity provides a lens of analysis. Her current book project, titled Unsilencing, explores the power of breaking through silence to speak about psychiatric disability and combat ableism. Drawing from history, disability studies, cultural studies, genealogy, and memoir, this interdisciplinary project explores madness in diverse historical archives and cultural texts.

Publications

“In Search of Revolutionary Continuity: Antifascism in Post-1959 Cuba.” In From the Margins to the Center: Antifascism(s) in Latin America. Jorge A. Nállim and Sandra McGee Deutsch, eds. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

“Seeing Madness in the Archives.” The American Historical Review 127, no. 3 (September 2022).

“Writing Madness from the Rocking Chair.” Special Issue on Carework and Writing during COVID. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics 7, no. 1 (Fall 2022).

With Fraser Raeburn. “Foreign volunteer fighters can greatly assist Ukraine. But there will be challenges, too.” Washington Post (10 March 2022).

“For a New Cuba and a New Spain: Popular Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War.” In Atlantic Crossroads: Webs of Migration, Culture and Politics between Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1800–2020. José Moya, ed. Routledge, 2021.

“‘A great example of international solidarity’: Cuban Medical Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.” In Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective: Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism. Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey, David Featherstone, eds. Routledge, 2020.

No Barrier Can Contain It: Cuban Antifascism and the Spanish Civil War. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

“Who is the Mysterious ‘Cuba Hermosa’? New Evidence Comes to Light.” The Volunteer (22 November 2016).