Leila Nilipour

Leila is a historian of modern Latin America interested in how everyday forms of gender-based violence were experienced, remembered and transmitted by urban working-class women who lived under Panama's military regime (1968–1989) and through its democratic transition into the 1990s. Using oral histories and archival research, she aims to explore how institutions like the Catholic Church and the military created new roles and became sources of empowerment for women, while also potentially appearing to threaten their traditional domestic roles, and whether the everyday forms and levels of state and intimate partner violence women experienced shifted as a result. Before pursuing a graduate degree in history, Leila worked as a journalist in Panama for nearly a decade, co-founded the award-winning narrative nonfiction podcast Indomables, and worked in communications at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.