Episode 83: Renata Keller Makes Space for Herself Through Writing

In this episode of Drafting the Past, you'll hear from a historian who had to figure out how to wrangle narratives from twenty different countries to tell a new history of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But keeping track of all those threads wasn't her only formidable challenge.

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by historian Dr. Renata Keller.

Dr. Keller is a professor at the University of Nevada and a historian of Modern Latin America. She is the author of two books, Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution, and The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War. I was eager to talk with Renata about how she grappled with the wide-ranging source material for The Fate of the Americas, but I also wanted to talk with her about another challenge: writing a book while dealing with the isolation of new parenthood, the struggle of postpartum depression and anxiety, and the exhaustion of balancing parenthood and research. In this conversation, you'll hear how she made space for herself and her writing, both physically and mentally, while working on her book.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Renata Keller, Mexico's Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution
• Renata Keller, The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War
• Zotero
• Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night
• Anne Rice, The Witching Hour
• Historias podcast, which includes the special series on the Cuban Missile Crisis that Renata co-produced
• Drafting the Past Episode 16: Abby Mullen Finds Focus