MEDIA ADVISORY: UNH Expert Available on Closing of Guantanamo Bay Prison
Newswise — DURHAM, N.H. -- Julia Rodriguez, associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, is available to provide commentary on the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Rodriguez lost her brother in the attacks on 9/11 in New York City and brings a unique perspective to why the prison should be shutdown.
Julia Rodriguez can be reached directly at [email protected].
Rodriguez, who teaches U.S.-Cuba relations and covers Guantanamo Bay in several of her classes on Latin American history, recently traveled with her mother to Guantanamo Bay prison in December. She was part of a group of 9/11 victim families invited by the Office of Military Commissions to listen to a week of pretrial hearings of five men accused of planning the attacks. For her, the experience raised some uncomfortable questions.
“In Guantánamo, I reflected on the meaning of justice—what it means to me, and what it means to my country. My family deserves justice. But Guantánamo can’t bring us that justice and should immediately be closed,” expressed Rodriguez in a recent opinion piece in Time.
Rodriguez says by going to Guantanamo she has been able to see up close that there are big legal problems and even bigger moral ones. She voices her concern over the “murkiness and lack of transparency” of the hearings and points to the complexity of the legal system which makes it difficult to navigate and is causing delays and doubts that any outcome will be fair.
Rodriguez’s younger brother, Gregory, was a 31-year-old information technologist at Cantor Fitzgerald. He was her only sibling. She says her family has to deal with the pain and anger everyday but they realize that nothing will bring him back.
Julia Rodriguez specializes in Latin American history and the history of science and medicine. She is the author of Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State (UNC Press, 2006), and has published articles in the American Historical Review, Isis, Science in Context, and the Hispanic American Historical Review. She is also editor of the open-source teaching website HOSLAC: History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean (www.hoslac.org). Rodriguez has been an ACLS Fellow, a fellow at the UNH Center for the Humanities, and a National Science Foundation CAREER awardee; her work has received awards from New England Council for Latin American Studies and the American Association for the History of Medicine. She was the Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in 2011-12.
The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is the state's flagship public institution, enrolling 13,000 undergraduate and 2,500 graduate students.
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