Rachel Nolan is an Assistant Professor at Boston University. Over the last eight years, she has had the opportunity to first live in Guatemala and then visit often, while researching the history of adoption there. Before becoming a historian, she was a journalist and still writes for magazines including The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. For the latter, she wrote an article in 2019 called "Destined for Export" that followed the story of one adoptee searching for his birth parents and connecting forcible adoptions in Guatemala to the history of genocide of Maya peoples.