Dr. Gema Santamaría is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at George Washington University. Her areas of specialization include violence, insecurity, and vigilantism in Mexico and Central America. Santamaría holds a PhD in Sociology and Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research and a Master in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics. Her doctoral dissertation- on lynching and vigilante violence in post-revolutionary Mexico- was awarded the 2015 Charles A. Hale Fellowship in Mexican History by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and the Albert Salomon Memorial Award in Sociology by the New School. Her research has been supported by several fellowships including a Fulbright-García Robles Scholarship, a Chevening Scholarship, and the Women in the Humanities Fellowship by the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

Prior to joining Loyola University, Chicago, Santamaría was an Assistant Professor and Director of the Undergraduate Program at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, a 2017–18 Kellogg visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame, as well as visiting fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has written specialized reports for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the Norwegian Peace-building Resource Center (NOREF). She is the editor, with David Carey Jr., of the volume Violence and Crime in Latin America: Politics and Representations (2017, University of Oklahoma Press). Dr. Santamaría is working on the book manuscript “In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico,” which traces the social and historical motives behind the persistence of lynching—a public, illegal, and particularly cruel form of violence.