Education
Ph.D. - Columbia University, 2009
M.Phil. - Columbia University, 2005
B.A. – The Johns Hopkins University, 2001
      The Peabody Conservatory, 2001

Interests and Research
Alhelí Alvarado's research explores intellectual engagement, grassroots movements and government rhetoric from a comparative and transnational angle.  Her approach is interdisciplinary combining methods from intellectual, cultural and social history, discourse analysis and political theory. The interaction between ethics and political action and its appropriation by political statesmen, intellectuals and militants leaders is at the heart of my historical inquiry and pedagogic program.  Her doctoral dissertation Democracy without Compromises: Political Critique and Intellectual Militancy from Socialisme ou Barbarie to l’esprit soixante-huitard reconstructs the intellectual origins of May 68 and their reception by post-1968 political theorists. 

 

Alhelí Alvarado is currently working on a manuscript for a book entitled From Illusion to Paradox: The Polemical Legacies of the Radical Sixties, a comparative history of Western European and American responses to the social and intellectual culture from 1968 to 2011.  The work explores the contradictory evolution of European and American political identities in the aftermath of 1968 and its repercussions in the context of the most recent socio-economic crisis.  The account focuses on the split identities of post-industrial Western societies, oscillating between the quest for economic prosperity and the rise of social discontentment.  Her work explores the reception of social critique by grassroots movements in the university, trade union and government milieu, emphasizing the dialogue between political theory and social mobilization.