Rebecca Herman

I'm a historian of the Americas concerned with the social, political, and environmental history of the twentieth century. 

I'm currently working on a book about Antarctica that explores a difficult question in international history: who decides what’s allowed in places that humans don’t naturally inhabit, like Antarctica, the deep seabed, and outer space? Competing answers to this question came to the fore in the 1970s and 80s as speculation grew about the future exploitation of Antarctica's oil and mineral resources. During these years, Argentina and Chile colonized the Antarctic peninsula to bolster their claims to sovereignty over Antarctic territory, leaders of recently decolonized countries fought to internationalize Antarctic governance, and a rising transnational environmental movement campaigned to preserve Antarctica as the planet's first World Park. Reconstructing these histories, I use the continent as a jumping off point to consider some of the key debates about natural resources, global inequality, and environmental degradation that continue to plague international politics today. The project is supported with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Hellman Fellows program.

My first book, Cooperating with the Colossus, published by Oxford University Press in 2022, reconstructed the fraught history of US military basing in World War II Latin America. Cooperating with the Colossus was named a Best Book of 2023 by Foreign Affairs and received book prizes and honorable mentions from the Latin American Studies Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. 

Before entering academia, I spent several years in Argentina, with shorter stints in Bolivia, Brazil, and Boston, working on assorted documentary and translation projects with support from the Benenson Award in the Arts and the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellowship. I am also a life-long fiction writer. What connects all these dots is that in fiction and non-fiction, writing and film, I'm interested in the meaning we make with the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us.

I welcome the opportunity to work with graduate students interested in modern Latin American history, international and global history, and environmental history. I am especially keen on methodological approaches that ground big questions of international import in the everyday lives of "ordinary" people, or otherwise move between scales of history to consider a concept or problem from local, national, and international perspectives.

PUBLICATIONS:

Books:

Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, September 2022)

• Winner, Tonous & Warda Johns Family Book Award, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association 
• Honorable Mention, Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award, Latin American Studies Association
• Honorable Mention, Myrna Bernath Book Award, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
• Honorable Mention, Pacific Coast Branch Award, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association 

Articles and Essays:

"Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina," Environmental History Volume 29:1 (January 2024)

"Antarctica & Colonialism: A Historian's Reflections," Colonialism and Antarctica: Attitudes, Logics, and Practices, edited by Peder Roberts and Alejandra Mancilla (Manchester University Press, 2024)

"Latin America and the Guts of Global History" The American Historical Review Volume 128, Issue 1 (March 2023) in the "Forum On Transnational and International History."

"Social Peace in a Time of War: Labor Justice and Foreign Policy in World War II Brazil" in The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States, ed. Fernando Teixeira da Silva, Alexandre Fortes, Thomas D. Rogers, and Gillian McGillivray (Lexington Books, 2023)

“Latin America and US Global Governance” in Cambridge History of America in the World, Volume 3, ed. Mark Bradley, Brooke Blower, Andrew Preston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

“Covid-19: A Crash Course in Contingency” Diplomatic History Vol 45, Issue 3 (June 2021): 510-516.

"The Global Politics of Anti-Racism: A View from the Canal Zone" American Historical Review Volume 125, Issue 2 (April 2020): 460-486.

• Honorable Mention, Bernath Scholarly Article Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations

"A Paz Social em tempo de guerra: Justiça do Trabalho e política externa no Brasil na Segunda Guerra Mundial" in Trabalho & Labor: Histórias Compartilhadas Brasil e Estados Unidos Século XX, ed. Fernando Teixiera da Silva e Alexandre Fortes (Editora Sagga, 2020).

"An Army of Educators: Gender, Revolution and the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961" Gender & History Volume 24, Issue 1 (April 2012): 93-111.