Rebecca Herman

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

I'm currently at work on a book about Antarctica that explores a thorny question in global history: who decides what’s allowed in places that humans don’t naturally inhabit, like Antarctica, the deep seabed, and outer space? The book examines this question through the competing visions for Antarctica that came to the fore in the 1970s and 80s 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 sovereignty over Antarctic territory, leaders of recently decolonized countries fought to internationalize Antarctic governance to gain access to the continent's foretold natural wealth, and a rising transnational environmental movement campaigned to make Antarctica the planet's first "World Park." Using Antarctica 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, this book aims to render complicated questions of environmental governance intelligible and compelling to a broad readership. This 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, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. It examines the fraught relationship between international cooperation and national sovereignty through a history of US military basing in World War II Latin America. 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. Through conflicts over labor rights, discrimination, sex, and criminal jurisdiction, the book demonstrates the ways that security cooperation relied on and reinforced inequality in inter-American affairs. 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. Research for this project was supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Mellon Foundation, among others.

In addition to my current book project, I'm working on a series of shorter, standalone pieces that examine Latin American engagements with international environmental politics in the 1980s and 90s. I'm interested in the concept of sustainable development in the context of democratic transitions, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of neoliberalism; tensions between national sovereignty and flagship global environmental concerns; and the growth of transnational environmental organizing within and beyond the region. I recently published an article in 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.

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.