Welcome Dr. Angélica Márquez Osuna
Traditional Maya beehives U Naajil Yuum K'iin in Man铆, Yucat谩n, M茅xico, where Luis Armando Quintal Medina and his team shared their knowledge of beekeeping with the native bee Melipona beecheii with Ang茅lica M谩rquez-Osuna in 2022.
Meet Dr. Angélica Márquez Osuna, the History Department’s newest faculty member! She comes to Loyola from Harvard University where she earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science. This year, she will be teaching HIST 210, Introduction to Latin American History, and a course on the history of agriculture in Latin America in Spring 2025.
Dr. Márquez Osuna began her career as a journalist, earning a B.A. in Communication Studies with a Socio-Cultural Research concentration from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO), a Jesuit university in her hometown of Guadalajara, México. Her journalistic background would come to shape how she researches history, as it taught her the value of interviews, oral histories, and spending time in the places at the center of her research to experience the environment firsthand. She then pursued an M.A. in Social Anthropology from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, México (UADY). After graduating, she conducted interviews with farmers who introduced her to the importance of beekeeping in the Yucatán Peninsula. Her project eventually pointed her toward the history of science. “When I started my research, I thought that this would be a contemporary history about the environment, about bees, and how bees are endangered. But as soon as I started the research, it required me to think about [the history of beekeeping] in a long-term and a global approach. That brought me to think about the connections with colonialism. There is a strong link between modernity, capitalism, and colonialism that has affected or that has shaped the environment.” Knowing this, she realized, she “should tell this story not from the early twentieth century or late nineteenth century, but since the colonial period.”
After completing a M.A. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard, Dr. Márquez Osuna joined the Loyola History Department as an Assistant Professor. She was drawn to Loyola for its prestige as a leading research institution, for the strength of its history department, and because she appreciates the impact of Jesuit pedagogy, having attended a Jesuit university as an undergraduate.
Dr. Márquez Osuna’s current project is to write a book on the history of bees and beekeeping in the Americas. Focusing on the connections between the Yucatán Peninsula, Cuba, and the United States, she uncovers the impacts of Spanish colonization on how bees and humans interact with one another. The bees we now rely on to produce honey and wax, she finds, are European honeybees first introduced during the colonial period and used for industrial honey production in the 19th century. Several questions animate Dr. Márquez Osuna’s research: given the Maya’s pre-colonial beekeeping practices using bees native to the Americas, she asks, “why did 20th-century beekeepers in Yucatán decide to change their practices? How have governments or markets influenced their decisions, and how have their decisions also influenced the global market of honey and beekeeping culture?” Holding up a magnifying glass to the world of bees and other insects reveals much about our environment and geopolitics, Dr. Márquez Osuna argues. An historical actor is an historical actor, no matter how small.
Welcome to Loyola, Dr. Márquez Osuna!