Daniela Samur | Assistant Professor
Daniela Samur
Assistant Professor
CTIHB 247
About
I am a historian of modern Latin America, with an emphasis on Colombia. My research focuses on everyday state formation, geography and space, labor, and the urban question. My current book project Binding the State: Bogotá’s World of Print studies state formation as a material and spatial process in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Colombia. It does so through an analysis of Bogotá’s world of print; one made by the labor of typesetters, prisoners, bookstore owners and scribes, and that took form in printing shops, bookstores, and libraries. The book argues that books and paper forms were the material basis on which the operation and articulation of the Colombian state depended. My next project is a longue-durée history of Bogotá.
PhD, History, Cornell University, 2024
MA, Literary Studies, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2019
BA, History, Universidad de los Andes, 2013
BA, Political Science, Universidad de los Andes, 2012
Modern Latin America, the Andes, Colombia, labor, state formation, urban history, print culture.
Articles
“Enlarging Bogotá: The Production of Urban Space.” Journal of Urban History 52, no. 2 (2026): 322-346. Special Section: Capital Cities of Latin America: New Approaches and Scales https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442261421092
“Bogotá’s Librería Colombiana: Between Rural Haciendas and a Global World of Books, 1880s-1900s,” Journal of Urban History 50, no. 3 (2024): 496-510.Special section Global Urban History Project https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442231209270
Review essays
“The Politics of Printing and Knowledge Production in Latin America and the Caribbean,”
Itinerario 47, no 2 (2023): 278-87. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115323000037
HIST 1300: Latin America to the 1820s
HIST 1310: Latin America from the 1820s
HIST 3910: Fútbol in Latin America
HIST 3910: Urban Latin America
HIST 4300: Space and Politics in Modern Latin America
HIST 4990: Senior Seminar (Commodities)
HIST 7800: Historical Methods
Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History, Urban History Association, (2025)
Messenger Chalmers Graduate Prize for Best Dissertation, Department of History, Cornell University, (2024)
Deanne Gebell Gitner ’66 and Family Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants (2021)
Emerging Scholar, Global Urban History Project (GUHP) Mentorship Program (2021-2022)
Bibliographical Society of America-Pine Tree Foundation Fellowship in Hispanic Bibliography, Bibliographical Society of America (2020)