In Memoriam: Elizabeth Dore (1946–2022)

• Author: Steven Volk
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221112929
• Subject Matter: In Memoriam

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221112929

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 245, Vol. 49 No. 4, July 2022, 218

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221112929

© 2022 Latin American Perspectives

218

In Memoriam

Elizabeth Dore (1946–2022)

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 cri-

tique 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 work-

ing 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 emerg-

ing 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.

—Steven Volk

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