Miguel La Serna, "The Rise and Fall of the Shining Path" | National Humanities Center

Fellows

Miguel La Serna, “The Rise and Fall of the Shining Path”

February 1, 2017


Miguel La Serna
Miguel La Serna, UNC–Chapel Hill

Beginning as a small group of intellectual ideologues, the Shining Path grew to become a significant insurgency movement whose violent practices resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Peruvians in the late twentieth century. However, to understand the Shining Path’s history and its influence, it is important to understand its origins and the motivations of the individuals who formed its leadership.
​​Miguel La Serna is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his research focuses on the relationship between culture, memory, and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America. ​This year, as a Fellow at the Center he is working on a ​narrative history about the Shining Path, titled The Last Revolution: Shining Path and the War of the End of the World.