Matthew Scalena



Matt Scalena is a PHD Candidate, working with Paul Gootenberg and Brooke Larson. He entered the PHD program in 2005 after receiving his MA in History from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
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mscalena@gmail.com
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Research Interests

Modern Latin America. 

My dissertation, entitled "Illicit Nation: Panamanian State Formation, U.S. Empire, and Illegality across the Isthmus," focuses on the tandem twentieth-century developments of Panamanian state formation and U.S. empire building on the Isthmus of Panama, a transit space of global importance.  Specifically, I chart attempts through the first half of the twentieth century to domesticate and control this space by focusing on the construction and maintenance of borders, both imperial (e.g. the Canal Zone border) and national (e.g. those that guarded Panamanian sovereignty).  These regulatory systems will be explored through interactions between the states’ functionaries, the people of Panama, and the Isthmus’s growing diasporic cultures in relation to smuggling and other transnational illegal “flows” passing across the Isthmus.  Such “flows” include peoples, arms, contraband, gems, drugs, and exiles.  This dance—between those constructing and guarding the Isthmus’s multiple boundaries and those attempting to subvert them—highlights the dynamic interactions of a state in formation, a budding empire, and the vast illegal economic activity that developed alongside legal trade.

Scholarly Works

Media - http://www.grad.sunysb.edu/newsletter/scalena.shtml