Rebecca Herman

I'm a historian of the Americas. My current research is focused on environmental politics in the twentieth century.

I'm currently writing a book about Antarctica that explores a vexing question in international affairs: who gets to decide what’s permitted in places that humans don’t naturally inhabit, like Antarctica, the deep seabed, the atmosphere, and outer space? After World War II, as decolonization transformed the globe into a community of nation-states, questions remained about how places and resources beyond national borders fit in the new world order. The book explores competing visions for Antarctica that came to the fore as speculation grew about the future exploitation of the continent’s mineral resources. 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 the planet's first "World Park." Through the struggle for Antarctica, my book contemplates the international community'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. In support of this project, I have received fellowships from the American Society for Environmental History, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Hellman Fellows Program.

I'm also working on a project on Latin American engagements with international environmental politics in the 1980s and 90s. I'm interested in the rise and utility of "sustainable development" in the context of democratic transitions, the debt crisis, and the Earth Summit; tensions between national sovereignty and flagship global environmental concerns like deforestation; and the growth of transnational environmental organizing within and beyond the region. I recently published an article in the journal Environmental History, "Greenpeace Goes South: The Promise and Pitfalls of Global Environmentalism in Argentina," that reconstructs the history of Greenpeace International’s first office in the so-called developing world, which opened in Buenos Aires in the 1980s.

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 Social Science Research Council, the Smithsonian Institution, the Council on Library and Information Resources, 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)

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.