Javier Cikota

Javier Cikota received his B.A. (History and Latin American Studies) from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of California, Berkeley. Javier's research centers on how states establish legitimacy in frontier spaces, incorporating issues of legal literacy, gender dynamics, and nationalism to social and political history. His current book project, "Frontier Justice," investigates how European settlers and indigenous peoples in Patagonia learned to use the institutions and agents of the Argentine state for their own ends.

He teaches Latin American history from the fifteenth century to the present, and his courses often address revolutionary movements, exploring concepts of race and national belonging, while focusing on borderland regions at the edges of empires. He is interested in legal documents (court cases, petitions, complaints) as windows into the beliefs and lives of everyday people.