Faculty

Biography, Education and Training

My research and teaching address the construction of borders over time and the movement of people across them. I also analyze the ways that historical documents are produced and curated, and how those processes structure historical memory and geographical imaginations. I tend to focus broadly on the Americas, but I have particular interest in southeastern South America (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Southern Brazil).

My first book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met, explores how autonomous Indigenous communities known as Charrúas and Minuanes responded to Ibero-American efforts to create a border between Brazil and Spanish South America. My current research considers the colonial practices of banishment and penal colonization as forerunners to modern penitentiaries and deportation regimes.

Prior to joining the LALS faculty, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of New Mexico. I received my PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Honors, Awards and Grants

Sturgis Leavitt Award for Best Article (Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies), 2024

Research Grant (MRPI Routes of Enslavement in the Americas), 2024

Large Grant Program (UCSC Committee on Research), 2023-2025

Building Belonging Award (UCSC Institute for Social Transformation), 2024

Alfred B. Thomas Book Award (honorable mention) (Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies), 2021

ACLS Fellowship (American Council of Learned Societies), 2020-2021

Sprout Grant (UCSC Institute for Social Transformation), 2020-2021

Faculty Research Grant (Committee on Research), 2020-2021

Hellman Fellowship (Declined), 2020-2021

New Faculty Research Grant (Committee on Research), 2019

Jeannette D. Black Memorial Fellowship (The John Carter Brown Library), 2016

Selected Publications

Book

Entre caciques y cartógrafos: La construcción de un límite interimperial en la Sudamérica del siglo XVIII. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2022.

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Articles & Book Chapters

“Property Mapping in Spanish America,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, Roger Kain, ed., v. 5. Chicago, University of Chicago Press (forthcoming, 2025)

“Entre assentamentos e toldarias: a demarcação de limites no Rio da Prata” em Produzindo Fronteiras: entrecruzando escalas, povos e impérios na América portuguesa (1640-1828), editado por Iris Kantor, Belo Horizonte: Editora Autêntica (forthcoming): 99-128.

“Afterlives in Captivity: Indigeneity and Penal Deportation in Southeastern South America,” Atlantic Studies, 2023, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2023.2205977

“Despoliticización a través de la naturalización: Félix de Azara y pueblos indígenas en el Río de la Plata y Paraguay,” Boletín Americanista, no. 84 (2022): 105-126

“Between Ethnonyms and Toponyms: Cartography and Native Pasts in the Eastern Río de la Plata,” in Prado, Fabrício, Viviana Grieco, and Alex Borucki, eds., The Río de la Plata from Colony to Nations, New York: Palgrave Macmillian (2021): 9-30.

“Still Turning toward a Cartographic History of Latin America,” with Brian Bockelman, History Compass, 18, e12617 (2020): 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12617

“Across Archival Limits: Imperial Records, Changing Ethnonyms, and Geographies of Knowledge,” with Sergio Latini, Ethnohistory 66, no. 2 (2019): 249-273

“Borderline Offerings: Tolderías and Mapmakers in the Eighteenth-Century Río de la Plata” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (2016): 445-480

Teaching Interests

Dr. Erbig's teaching focuses on Latin America broadly, with a special focus on Southern South America and Brazil. His topical courses address colonialism, nationalism, spatial thought, migration, and the historical agency of Indigenous Americans and African Americans. He also teaches a methods course on digital mapping in the social sciences and humanities.