Rebecca Herman is a historian of modern Latin America. An active scholar in the growing subfield of "Latin America in the World," her work explores the intersections between international and domestic politics in the Americas in the twentieth century.
She is currently working on her first book, a social and political history of “cooperation in security” between Latin America and the United States that is centered on the pivotal experience of U.S. military basing in Latin America during World War II. Focusing on Brazil, Cuba, and Panama, Herman finds that though Latin American sovereignty was preserved in principle in cooperative diplomatic agreements, local events in courtrooms, on picket lines, outside of U.S.O. clubs and inside red light districts precipitated debates over the practical meaning of sovereignty in the everyday lives of ordinary Latin Americans. Latin American leaders’ efforts to resolve local conflicts on the international stage illuminate larger transformations that took place during the war in the relationship between international aid, military power and domestic politics in Latin America.
Prior to entering academia, Herman spent several years in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil working as a freelance translator, researcher and documentarian.
Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, Herman was Assistant Professor of International Studies and Latin American Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, and the Council on Library and Information Resources, among others. She received her Ph.D. from Berkeley and her B.A. from Duke.
