Wiebke Ipsen, Assistant Professor of Latin American History at the University of Maine since 2006, passed away on January 27, 2009, at the age of 38, after a long and eventful time with cancer. Wiebke was as sweet and gentle a person as she was a brilliant and dedicated researcher and teacher. She received undergraduate degrees from Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, and Freie Universität Berlin. She then moved to San Francisco, studying at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University, where she earned a B.A. equivalent and a master’s degree in history. She obtained her Ph.D. in Latin American history at the University of California, Irvine, in 2005, under the direction of Steven Topik.
A master of five languages, she decided to learn a sixth, Portuguese, to study gender relations in Brazil. Her masterful dissertation, “Delicate Citizenship: Gender and Nation-Building in Brazil, 1865–1891,” brought...
