Dr Julie Gibbings

Senior Lecturer

Biography

Background

I am a historian of modern Latin America with a focus on Indigenous histories and collaborative methods, particularly in Guatemala. My research interests have ranged temporally across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thematically from liberalism, political modernities, racial capitalism, and labour to, more recently, histories of cartographic sciences and technologies in Cold War counter-insurgency, insurrection, and megadevelopment. Through these varied interests, I have maintained a deeper focus on uncovering complex human stories, tending to the multiple ways of being and understanding the world, and centring the voices of those who are often marginalized and silenced. These research interests were undoubtedly shaped by my own background as a settler Canadian who was born and raised in the prairies in Treaty 4 territory of the nêhiyawak, Anihšināpēk, Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, and the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation.

My love for Guatemala, and Latin America more generally, came after traveling and studying in the region during my formative 20s, which led me to pursue a PhD in Latin American History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Due to ever-increasing social debts in Guatemala, and elsewhere, I am eternally obliged to produce more and better histories.

I arrived in Edinburgh in 2019, after a short stint at the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University and a few years close to home as a tenure-track professor at the University of Manitoba.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History

Undergraduate teaching

Indigenous Peoples and Revolution in Modern Latin America

Cartography, Territory, and Indigeneity

Postgraduate teaching

Narrating Native Histories

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

Areas accepting Research Students in:

I am currently accepting students interested in Modern Latin America (19th and 20th centuries), and would supervise a wide-range of topics including indigenous histories as well as histories of labour and capitalism, race and racism, as well as histories of cartography and political violence in Latin America. Please feel free to contact me to discuss a proposed topic.

Research summary

Places: 

  • Latin America

Themes: 

  • Culture
  • Ethnicity
  • Gender
  • Medicine, Science & Technology
  • Politics
  • War

Periods: 

  • Nineteenth Century
  • Twentieth Century & After

Current research interests

I am a historian of Modern Latin America, and the indigenous Americas more broadly. My transdisciplinary research centres on the nexus of race, gender, and class exclusions, especially the experiences of Indigenous peoples and the histories of science and technology. I am currently researching the history of Indigenous and state cartographic technologies and knowledges in Cold War Guatemala. I am the PI on an AHRC funded grant "Komon Sajb’ichil for Ixil Cartographies during the Cold War: Knowledge Exchange for Intergenerational Justice." This is an interdisciplinary and collaborative research project with Ixil University and the Ancestral Authorities, with postdoctoral fellow Dr. Alejandro Flores and Co-I Feliciana Sitpo'p Herrera. Our research is modelled on the lxil practice of Komon Sajb’ichil (New Dawn through Community). The Komon Sajb’ichil is a communal ritual that begins every spring, when it is time to plant a new field of maize. Upon the request of an Ixil family, the entire community works in rotation through the night to complete ancestral ceremonies until the sajb’ichal (new dawn), when the whole community awakens to plant corn. This is a communal labour rooted in Maya principles of solidarity and reciprocity to cultivate a new beginning and ensure prosperity for all. Grounded in the theory and method of Komon Sajb’ichil, our collaborative research project seeks to remember Ixil cartographies––the ways they navigated, understood, and represented places––in the midst of insurrection, state terror, exile, and refuge, to prepare for a new future. More recently, I was also awarded an AHRC fellowship for my allied project "Cold War Cartographies: Geographic Knowledge and Technology during the Guatemalan Civil War (1945-1996)." In this project, I examine the history of state and non-state geographic knowledge and technologies during the Latin American Cold War in Guatemala, and the role these knowledges played in both counter-insurgency terror and megadevelopment. My writing has received awards including the James Alexander Robertson prize and the German History Society Best Article Prize.

Past research interests

My first book manuscript, Our Time is Now: Race and Modernity in Postcolonial Guatemala (Cambridge University Press, 2020) analyzes how historical time itself was at the center of political struggles over the meaning of modernity among diverse actors ranging from Q'eqchi' Mayas to German settlers and their mixed-race offspring. In highlighting the many meanings and potency of time, this book also disrupts linear historical narratives and modern notions of human agency and causation. I also recently edited (with Heather Vrana, University of Florida), Out of the Shadow: Revisiting the Revolution from Post-Peace Guatemala (University of Texas Press, 2020), which centers on Guatemala's revolution of 1944-54, one of the most important events in Latin American history. Showcasing cutting edge new research by senior and junior scholars from the global north and south, this edited volume sheds new light on the many revolutions that were fought over during Guatemala's "Ten Years of Spring" and their enduring legacies.
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