Barbara A. Sommer

Barbara A. Sommer is a Professor of History and Johnson Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Gettysburg College. She specializes in Amazonian history and Colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on indigenous communities, cultural identity, and borderlands.

Her research interests include:

• Amazonian history
• Colonial Latin American history
• Indigenous studies
• Borderlands studies
• Ethnogenesis and cultural identity formation
• Riverine environments

Dr. Sommer's work examines how geographic and ecological zones shaped social and cultural identities in Portuguese Amazonia, with particular attention to migration patterns, inter-ethnic relations, and the impact of colonialism on indigenous communities. Her research reveals how runaways to remote tributaries would later be identified as 'uncontacted tribes' by twentieth-century ethnographers. She analyzes how Portuguese explorers, slave traders, and missionaries moved upriver during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, creating complex dynamics of conflict, cooperation, and cultural transformation.

She has received prestigious research fellowships including:

• Fundação Luso-Americana fellowship
• John Carter Brown Library fellowship
• Fulbright Commission fellowship