Heather Vrana, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Heather Vrana specializes in modern Latin American history, focusing on Central America.
She investigates themes including student and youth movements, disability, social class, race, medicine and national identity. Her pioneering work challenges conventional narratives by centering disability, both as a lived experience and as a political and medical concept, in the context of civil wars in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
In her research, Vrana explains how disability was not only an outcome of war but, when understood broadly to include the impacts of malnutrition, disease and dangerous work conditions, also a reason why people took up arms. She argues that to fully comprehend the civil wars, and the Cold War alongside them, it is essential to consider the political impacts of health.
She earned her Ph.D. in 2013 from Indiana University and joined the UF history faculty in 2017 after teaching at Southern Connecticut State University.
Vrana is the author of “This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996” and “Anti-Colonial Texts from Central American Student Movements 1929-1983,” both published in 2017. She also co-edited “Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala.” Vrana’s more recent articles have been published in the American Historical Review and the Hispanic American Historical Review. She also co-edited “Histories of Disability in Latin America,” which is set to be published in early 2026.
Vrana’s ongoing book project, “Guerrilla Medicine and Disability in Cold War Central America,” uses archival and oral history research to explore how disability emerged as both a cause and consequence of conflict. The book details how guerrilla medic systems provided care, inclusion and rehabilitation, offering a fresh lens on revolution, human rights and state-building and addresses the politicization of medicine in the context of the Cold War.
Vrana’s interdisciplinary scholarship intersects social history, disability studies and medical humanities. Her work emphasizes marginalized voices in the understanding of conflict, healing and memory, reshaping how we understand Central American history and its global resonances.
Joseph F. Spillane, chair of the Department of History, described Vrana as “pathbreaking” and an “agile and intellectually curious scholar.”
“She is inventive and productive in equal measure and rapidly securing for herself a substantial international reputation.”