Rebecca Herman

My research is concerned with the social, political, and environmental history of the twentieth century with a focus on Latin America, US foreign relations - and, most recently, Antarctica.

Who decides what’s permitted in places that humans don’t naturally inhabit, like Antarctica, the deep seabed, the atmosphere, and outer space? This question, for Antarctica, became urgent in the 1970s and 80s amid growing interest in the exploitation of the continent’s mineral resources. My current book project reconstructs the struggle over the Antarctic during these pivotal decades in international environmental politics, when decolonization had transformed the globe into a community of nation-states, but questions remained about how places and resources beyond national borders fit in the new world order. During these years, Argentina and Chile colonized the Antarctic peninsula to bolster their claims to Antarctic territory, leaders of recently decolonized countries denounced the existing practice of Antarctic governance as elitist, and a rising transnational environmental movement campaigned to make Antarctica humanity’s first World Park. Through the struggle for Antarctica, the book contemplates humanity’s efforts to reconcile an emerging common concern with "the planet” with the particular economic and geopolitical concerns of the different countries and people that populate it. Research for this project is supported by the Hellman Faculty Fellowship and the Samuel P Hays Fellowship of the American Society for Environmental History.

I am also working on a few shorter pieces more squarely concerned with environmental politics in Latin America in this shifting international landscape. I recently published an article in Environmental History called "Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina." The article uses the history of Greenpeace International’s first office in the so-called developing world, which opened in Buenos Aires in the 1980s, to complicate common assumptions about the North-South divide in environmental politics. Currently, in dialogue with other historians who seek to push our understanding of Latin America in the 1980s beyond the trope of the “lost decade,” I'm writing about an effort to establish a Latin American regional platform on sustainable development ahead of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. 

My first book, Cooperating with the Colossus, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. The book examines the fraught relationship between cooperation and sovereignty in the Americas through a history of US military basing in Latin America during the Second World War. Despite widespread acclaim for Pan-American unity with the Allied cause, US basing incited local conflicts over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction. Anchored in the wartime experiences of Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, the book moves between the American foreign ministries and the cantinas, courtrooms, plazas, and brothels where the wartime alliance took shape. 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. Reseach for this project was supported by fellowships and awards from the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the George C. Marshall Foundation, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, among others.

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.

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.