Ph.D. Candidate
North America
J. (Julia) C. Frankenbach is a historian of early North America. She specializes in the economic history of the Pacific world in the age of revolutions and gravitates to historical topics combining Indigenous history, gender, and the environment.
In 2013, she earned a B.A. in environmental studies from Mount Holyoke College before studying history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she completed her M.A. in 2017. At Berkeley, she is working on a history of Indigenous livestock production in the Spanish-occupied San Francisco Bay Area. The project shines a spotlight on a set of little-known figures--Indigenous stock raisers, or vaqueros, provisioned with horses by the missions. It argues that vaqueros leveraged their unique positions in the colonial apparatus in ways that loosened the hold of the colonial establishment on California Indian lives and resources over the long term. Julia has received support for her work from the the Bancroft Library, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, the American Philosophical Society, and the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies.
Julia is involved in several initiatives to support K-12 educators interested in incorporating recent scholarship in their California history curricula. In summer 2022 she collaborated with the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project to host a K-12 teachers' institute on histories of slavery in California. She also spearheaded H-Net's Teach California project, an initiative to make university-developed teaching resources accessible to educators in K-12 and community college spaces.
Research Interests
North American West
Indigenous history
Colonial Mexico
Environmental history
Gender & the environment
California Indian studies
Conference & Workshop Presentations
2025 "Fire & Gender-Based Captivity in Spanish-Occupied California" - Institute of Latin American Studies, Columbia University
2025 "How to Hide a Workforce: Native Labor & the Franciscan Order’s Alta California" - Western History Association Annual Meeting, Albuquerque
2025 "The Environmental History of Small Places" - American Society for Environmental History Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh
2024 "Livestock Production, Gender, & Power in the Greater Indigenous Bay Area" - BOCA LONGA, Emory University
2023 “Strange Missions: Livestock Production & Space in the Native San Francisco Bay" - Workshop for New & Emerging Studies of the Spanish Borderlands, Huntington Library
2022 “Roads to Reclamation: Fugitive Networks & Indigenous Nation-Building in the Heart of California” - Front Range Early American Consortium
2018 “Equestrian Labor & Indigenous Knowledge in Spanish-Occupied California” - Western History Association Annual Meeting, San Antonio
Fellowships & Awards
2025 Mabelle McLeod Lewis Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2025 Bancroft Library Summer Study Award
2024 Phillips Fund Grant in Native American Research, American Philosophical Society
2023 Best Graduate Seminar Paper Prize, UC Berkeley Department of History
2022 Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
2021 Tinker Field Research Grant, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
2021 Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies
2020 Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study
Education
M.A., History, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2017
B.A., summa cum laude in Environmental Studies, Mount Holyoke College, 2013
