About

Joshua Savala is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. Prior to UTEP he was at Rollins College from 2019 to 2024. Savala earned his PhD in History from Cornell University in 2019. He is the author of Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), which won honorable mentions for the Flora Tristán Award (best book on Peru) given by the Peru Section of LASA and Best Book (Social Sciences) on the Southern Cone given by the Southern Cone Studies Section of LASA. The book has been translated into Spanish and published in Peru (Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) and Chile (Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile) as Más allá de la guerra: Historian de cooperación en el Pacífico peruano-chileno, 1856-1929. He has also published articles in Hispanic American Historical Review and Journal of Social History, which won the Premio José María Arguedas Prize for best article on Peru (LASA), and Best Graduate Student Paper on Labor Studies (LASA), respectively. Recently he published articles in the Journal of Historical Geography and Macrohistoria. His research and writing have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, Cornell University, and Rollins College.

After finishing his undergraduate degree at the University of California, Davis in 2007, Savala worked as a union organizer with AFSCME Local 3299 in San Diego, California for two years. In 2012 he completed an MA in History at Tufts University and then went on to Cornell for his doctorate.

Savala’s research interests are in labor and working-class history, social movements, oceans, history of medicine, and the state.

He is currently working on two articles, including one on state formation in early twentieth century Chile; and a book chapter on the transnational and Pacific elements in the huelga del mono in Chile (1913). He is also in the early stages of two book length projects: on labor history in Callao, Peru from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century; and another on the Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo.

Contact: jpsavala [@] utep.edu