Abstract
Elizabeth (Liz) Dore, a brilliant scholar, innovative historian of Latin America, and unfaltering voice for a truly egalitarian socialism, passed away on May 5, 2022. Liz was professor emerita of modern languages and linguistics at Southampton University in the UK. Previously, she taught at Leeds and the University of Portsmouth in the UK and at Middlebury College. She was a committed socialist throughout her life, devoted to the ideal of an egalitarian community free from racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. That commitment would lead her both to study revolutionary societies and to critique top-down bureaucracy and the stifling of democratic participation.
She became an early participating editor of Latin American Perspectives and published a number of articles in it, including a 1977 preview of her first book, The Peruvian Mining Industry: Growth, Stagnation, and Crisis (1988; 2019). She also coauthored several articles in LAP with her husband, John Weeks. In 1981 she moved with her two-year-old twins to Nicaragua, where she began working in the Ministry of Information in the (then) revolutionary government. Her time in Nicaragua formed the basis of her second book, Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua (2006).
Liz edited two volumes on gender in Latin America, Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice (1997) and (with Maxine Molyneux), the pathbreaking Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (2000), which joined theoretically sophisticated literatures on the state and gender, respectively.
In the early 2000s she turned her attention to Cuba and began collecting the oral histories that would form the basis of her final work, How Things Fall Apart: The Decline of the Cuban Revolution (forthcoming). This was the first large oral history project authorized by the Cuban government since 1970. Her team of British and Cuban researchers collected more than 100 in-depth life history interviews drawn from a cross-section of Cubans across the island. Her emerging analysis of the Cuban Revolution may also be found in “Which Way for Cuba?,” her last article for NACLA.
Liz and I were doctoral students at Columbia in the early 1970s and renewed our friendship in the 1990s, when my wife and I began our frequent travels to London. We always looked forward to conversation and long walks with Liz and her husband of 45 years, the economist John Weeks, one of the founders of the Union for Radical Political Economics, who died in 2020. Liz was devoted to her children, Matthew and Rachel, and her grandchildren. She was active in the left wing of the Labour Party and a long-time supporter of Jews for Justice. We will miss her laughter, her insight, and her unfailing dedication to giving voice to ordinary people.