Dr. Joshua Savala
Associate Professor of History
Dr. Joshua Savala is a historian of Latin America, especially Peru and Chile. His first book project, Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World (University of California Press, 2022) examines the collaborative relationships forged by Peruvians and Chileans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the book looks at maritime and port workers, masculinity and sexuality, medicine and cholera, anarchism, and the police. The book has won honorable mentions for the best book on the Southern Cone (Social Sciences) and the Flora Tristán prize (best book on Peru) from the Southern Cone and Peru sections of the Latin American Studies Association. The Fondo Editorial of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and the Instituto de Historia of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile co-published a Spanish translation as Más allá de la guerra: Historias de cooperación en el Pacífico peruano-chileno, 1856-1929 in 2024. Savala published a book chapter on the huelga del mono in 1913 Valparaíso, Chile for an edited volume on Latin America and the Pacific. With Ernesto Capello of Macalester College, he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Urban History on Capital Cities of Latin America: New Approaches and Scales, which also includes a co-written introduction to the issue. Savala’s articles have appeared in Macrohistoria, Journal of Historical Geography, Hispanic American Historical Review, and the Journal of Social History, the latter two winning awards for best article on Peru (José María Arguedas prize) and best graduate student paper through the Peru and Labor Studies sections of the Latin American Studies Association. He is also the history and social sciences book review editor for A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos.
He is currently working on two new projects. One is a history of slavery and freedom in Callao, Peru and the Black Pacific in the long nineteenth century; and the other examines the Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo in southern Peru in the early twentieth century.
Savala’s teaching interest include Modern Latin America, Histories of the Pacific, the Southern Cone, the Andes, social movements, labor and working-class history, and spatial history. Prior to arriving at UTEP in 2024, Savala taught at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. He received his PhD in History from Cornell University in 2019.
More information at my personal website.
Faculty profile
Contact Info:
Texas Western Hall 320J
Email: jpsavala@utep.edu
