Time Doesn’t Stop: History, Crisis, and the Future of Leftist Political Projects in South America

In this lecture, authors Aldo Marchesi y Vania Markarian will present their book El tiempo no para. The book aims to trace the history of the idea of human rights and to understand the impact of that concept on the development of democracies at the close of the 20th century and in progressive governments of the 21st century. It further puts forth questions on the limits of the language of human rights when considering the contemporary crisis.

Aldo Marchesi holds a PhD in History from New York University and is a Professor in the Department of Theory and Historiography at the Institute for History at The University of the Republic, as well as a member of the Center for Uruguayan Interdisciplinary Studies. Together with colleagues from other disciplines, he recently founded the Institute for Research on Social Justice and Inequality. He is a member of the National System of Researchers in Uruguay. He has served as a visiting professor at universities and research centers in the United States, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and China. His work has focused on the recent history of Uruguay and the Southern Cone. He has published numerous articles and books. His first book, reissued in 2023, was El Uruguay Inventado: La política audiovisual durante la dictadura. His most recent book, a regional history of the armed Left in the Southern Cone, was published in Spanish and English under the title Hacer la revolución (Making the Revolution). In 2021 he co-authored, with Vania Markarian and Gerardo Caetano, a book on the Left for the collection Historia de los partidos políticos en Uruguay. He has continued researching the Latin American Left in the 20th century and, within a broader context, Uruguay’s recent history. Since 2023, he has co-directed, together with Diego Sempol, a Research Group on the Left. In 2025, he published El tiempo no para: Historia, crisis y futuro para pensar proyectos de izquierda with Vania Markarian. He is currently completing Una historia mínima de las izquierdas latinoamericanas for El Colegio de México. Professor Marchesi has edited and co-edited several volumes and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Contemporánea and The Global Sixties. His current research project is Una Historia intellectual y politics de la idea de pobreza en el Uruguay contemporáneo (1943–2010). As part of this project, he was a research member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. This fall, he is a Tinker Visiting Professor at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Vania Markarian is the Coordinator of the General Archive at the University of the Republic (Udelar), a full-time tenured professor at the same institution, and a member of the National System of Researchers. She holds a PhD in History from Columbia University and a degree in Historical Sciences from Udelar. She has served as a visiting professor and researcher at various universities in Latin America (such as UNGS, UNSAM, and UFMG) and the United States (including Columbia University, the City University of New York, and Princeton University), as well as at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in France. From 2019 to 2021, she served as President of the Uruguayan Association of Historians. She has published books and articles on her areas of expertise both in Uruguay and abroad. Her main works include Idos y recién llegados: La izquierda uruguaya en el exilio y las redes transnacionales de derechos humanos (1967-1984)—originally published by Routledge as Left in Transformation: Uruguayan Exiles and the Latin American Human Rights Networks—and El 68 uruguayo: El movimiento estudiantil entre molotovs y música beat, which was also published in English by the University of California Press. Her most recent book is Universidad, revolución y dólares: Dos estudios sobre la Guerra Fría cultural en el Uruguay de los sesenta (2020). In 2025, she co-authored El tiempo no para: Historia, crisis y utopía para pensar proyectos de izquierda with Aldo Marchesi.

Photo Credit: Magdalena Gutiérrez