Katherine Bliss

Katherine E. Bliss is the deputy director and senior fellow of the Americas Program, and senior fellow of the Global Health Policy Center at CSIS. Before joining the Americas Program, she was a foreign affairs officer at the U.S. Department of State, where she focused on global health and the Western Hemisphere in the Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science and received the Superior Honor Award for her work on environmental health in 2006. From 1996 to 2003, she served on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she was associate professor; she is currently an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University and teaches courses in the School of Foreign Service’s Center for Latin American Studies. Bliss is the author or coeditor of books, reviews, and numerous articles on public health, gender issues, and reform politics in Latin America, including the 2007 coedited volume of Sexuality Research and Social Policy, “Nuevas direcciones: Sexuality, Politics, and Reproductive Health in Mexico”; Gender, Sexuality and Power in Latin America since Independence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), coedited with William E. French; and Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (Penn State Press, 2001).

Bliss received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and was a David E. Bell Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Center for Population and Development Studies in 2000–2001. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and was a U.S. Department of Education Jacob Javits Fellow. Bliss received her A.B. magna cum laude and her A.M. from Harvard University and also studied at the Colegio de México in Mexico City.