Eric Gettig

I teach modern international and global history, Latin American history, inter-American relations, and U.S. foreign relations. Broadly speaking, I am interested in how the peoples and governments of Latin America and the Caribbean have made their way in a modern world defined by great-power competition, globalized capitalism, and the fossil-fuel energy regime, phenomena centered in the global North and in particular the United States. For research I specialize in modern Cuba, with a particular focus on the intersection of politics, political economy, international relations, and the environment; in politics and foreign policy in contemporary Mexico; and in U.S. policy toward the non-aligned world or Global South. I have published mostly on U.S. and Cuban relations with the non-aligned and Afro-Asian movements during the Cold War.

In the School of Foreign Service I teach the core global and international history course in the M.S. in Foreign Service program and a graduate seminar on U.S.-Latin American relations in the M.A. in Latin American Studies program. I have also taught undergraduate courses in Cuban and world history in the History Department and a first-year proseminar on Latin American revolutions in the B.S. in Foreign Service program.

Since April 2019 I have worked as Deputy Chair of Western Hemisphere Area Studies at the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Service Institute, the leading institution for training and professional development for the U.S. government's international-affairs community. At FSI I teach interdisciplinary courses on Latin America and the Caribbean to help educate U.S. diplomats and other international-affairs professionals about the region and inter-American relations, with particular focus on Mexico.

I am also currently at work on my first book project, provisionally titled Carbon Counterpoint: Energy, Revolution, and U.S. Hegemony in Cuba and the Greater Caribbean. By exploring Cuba's fraught experience with the fossil-fuel energy regime – at once unique and typical of the broader pattern of Caribbean energy transitions – the book opens new avenues for understanding the political, economic, environmental, and cultural history of modern Cuba and of the Caribbean's place in the U.S.-centered global fossil energy regime.

I have been privileged to conduct research in Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, and the U.K., as well as throughout the United States. I spent 2013-14 as an International Dissertation Research Fellow sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, and have three times been appointed an affiliated researcher at the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Mankind, an environmental-studies center in Havana, Cuba. Prior to entering government service I also held an appointment (2017-19) as a non-resident Senior Associate in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a non-partisan think-tank in Washington, contributing to CSIS's research, analysis, and programming on contemporary issues in Cuba and the Caribbean and US policy toward the region.

I have published peer-reviewed scholarship on U.S. and Cuban foreign relations in Diplomatic History and in the edited volumes Latin America in the Global Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) and The Tricontinental Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and commentary on current issues in Cuba online in Americas Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, and NACLA Report on the Americas.