About

Tony Wood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in the political and social history of modern Latin America. His research focuses on the Latin American radical left during the interwar period, with a particular emphasis on transnational debates concerning empire, race, and sovereignty. His most recent book, titled Radical Sovereignty: Debating Race, Nation, and Empire in Interwar Latin America, published in 2026, is based on multilingual archival research conducted across five sites and fifteen archival repositories in Mexico, Cuba, Russia, and the US. The book reconstructs debates that took place in locations such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, Moscow, and Brussels, and argues that these debates significantly influenced Latin America's political landscape by shifting how radicals viewed the nation. Initially trained as a specialist on Russia and the former Soviet Union, Prof. Wood has authored works including Chechnya: The Case for Independence (2007) and Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018). He served as deputy editor of the New Left Review from 2007 to 2014 and is a member of its editorial board. His writings have appeared in outlets such as the London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation, and the Guardian (UK). While he is not currently accepting M.A. or PhD students, he is available to serve on graduate dissertation committees related to Latin American history.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Law
• Social Science
• Political economy
• Epistemology
• Economy
• Economic history
• Business
• Economics
• Finance
• Keynesian economics

Selected publications

• Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke era of gunboat diplomacy – and the rise of anti-imperialism it helped spur

  2026-04-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2026-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Radical Sovereignty

  2025-12-16

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Fighting Fascism on Empire’s Doorstep

  Radical History Review · 2024-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract From 1936 to 1939, the Cuban magazine Mediodía brought together Communists, socialists, and other progressives in a common battle against fascism, imperialism, and racism. Published in Havana, Mediodía was centrally concerned with Cuban domestic politics, in particular with struggles for democratic representation and for racial and gender equality. But for the magazine’s editors, these battles could not be disconnected from the broader turbulence afflicting the world in the 1930s, from the Spanish Civil War to the Japanese occupation of China and the Nazi threat in Europe. As a case study in imaginative radical publishing, Mediodía would be worthy enough of scholarly attention. But it also provides a compelling window onto Cuba’s Popular Front politics of the 1930s. Not only were the antifascist, antiracist convergences reflected in Mediodía’s pages formative for a generation of Cubans; they also anticipated the ideological alliances that shaped the island’s trajectory after the 1959 revolution.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Australia face a gas shortage? No – just Victoria, where empty wells meet a lack of planning

  2024-08-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Indoamerica against Empire: Radical Transnational Politics in Mexico City, 1925–1929

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-08-10 · 12 citations

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  Mexico City in the mid-1920s was a crucial gathering point for Latin American anti-imperialists. This chapter retraces the emergence of a common agenda among Communists, radical Mexican peasant movements, and exiled dissidents from across the region, focusing on the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA) and its publication, El Libertador. While it drew on the region's deep anti-imperialist traditions, the convergence that took place in the wake of Mexico's 1910–1920 Revolution was decisively shaped by transnational connections with the Communist International, which served as a conduit to anticolonial movements across the world. In the second half of the 1920s, LADLA and El Libertador not only animated movements for regional solidarity – notably against the US occupations of Nicaragua and Haiti – they also showcased a newly global anticolonial sensibility, drawing parallels between Latin America's situation and those of peoples subject to direct or indirect colonial rule in Africa, India, and China.

  PublisherDOI

• The government will underwrite risky investments in renewables – here’s why that’s a good idea

  2023-11-23

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• Cuba : les habits neufs de la révolution

  Books · 2022-02-08

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• Living the Revolution: New Perspectives on Cuban Social History

  Cuban studies · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  This dossier brings together five articles by scholars of the Cuban Revolution who rethink long-standing assumptions about the revolution's trajectory. The authors use newly available sources to advance novel arguments and to bring into focus different and complementary aspects of the revolutionary experience: agrarian reform, housing, literacy and international solidarity, scientific collaboration, and religion. The articles embrace the contingency and unevenness of Cuba's process of social transformation, giving weight to the role of lived experience in the reformulation of social and political structures on the island. What emerges from these contributions is a revolutionary state in continuous negotiation with different forces, facing not only foreign governments that seek to reshape the revolution or cut it short but also pressure to radicalize from below. RESUMEN: Este dossier reúne cinco artículos sobre la Revolución cubana que replantean algunas de las premisas básicas de la trayectoria revolucionaria. Los autores utilizan fuentes solo disponibles recientemente para plantear nuevos argumentos y resaltar diferentes—y complementarios—aspectos de la revolución: reforma agraria, políticas de vivienda, alfabetización y solidaridad internacional, colaboración científica y religión. Los artículos presentados asumen la contingencia y las singularidades del proceso de transformación social cubano, resaltando el rol de la experiencia cotidiana en la reformulación de las estructuras sociales y políticas en la isla. De estos aportes, surge un Estado revolucionario en constante proceso de negociación con diferentes actores: gobiernos extranjeros que buscan reformular la revolución—o impedir su desarrollo—así como presiones desde abajo para tomar medidas más radicales.

  PublisherDOI

• Another Country: Cuban Communism and Black Self-Determination, 1932–1936

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2022-11-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Between 1932 and 1935, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) argued that the majority-Black population of Oriente, the island's easternmost province, should be granted the right to national self-determination. While this policy has often been dismissed as a passing aberration, I argue that Black self-determination in fact left a lasting imprint both on the PCC and on the country's political landscape. I draw on research in Cuban and Russian archives to show that, far from being imposed on local Communists by the Comintern, the policy was most clearly formulated by Cubans, including leading members of African descent. I further show that it served as the focal point for the development of the PCC's antiracist stance, which by the end of the decade had made it a leading proponent of equality. Self-determination was integral to that transformation, which reshaped the party's composition and social basis for years to come.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jacqueline Barron

  11 shared

• Gerald Crawley

  11 shared

• Charles M. Diserens

  3 shared

• Brendan Coates

  2 shared

• Danielle Wood

  2 shared

• Marion Terrill

  2 shared

• Stephen Duckett

  2 shared

• John Daley

  2 shared