Bio
Joel Hebert holds a joint appointment as Chief of Clark Special Collections in the McDermott Library and as Assistant Professor in the Department of History. Dr. Hebert joined the faculty at USAFA in 2022, having previously served as a federal historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command at the Washington Navy Yard. Prior to his time as a Navy civilian, he worked at the U.S. Army's Center of Military History at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C. In the McDermott Library, Dr. Hebert manages the Academy archive, a repository for historical materials that document the origin of the U.S. Air Force, the Air Force Academy, and a variety of topics related to the history of human flight. He works with faculty to integrate these materials into the course curriculum in innovative ways. Trained as an historian of modern Britain and the former British Empire, Dr. Hebert teaches courses on global and comparative topics in the History department, and he is currently revising a book for publication entitled Mrs. Thatcher's Empire: Decolonization and Democracy in 1980s Britain.
Education
PhD, History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2019)
MA, History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2013)
BA, History and International Studies, University of Alaska Anchorage (2010)
Professional Experience
Assistant Professor and Chief of Special Collections, McDermott Library, U.S. Air Force Academy (February 2022 − Present)
Assistant Professor, Department of History, U.S. Air Force Academy (January 2023 – Present)
Historian, Naval History and Heritage Command, Department of the Navy (February 2020 – January 2022)
Historian, Center of Military History, Department of the Army (August 2018 – January 2020)
Honors & Awards
Best Article Prize, Society for Historians of the Federal Government, 2023
Honorable Mention, Walter D. Love Prize for Best Article in British History, North American Conference on British Studies, 2020
Past and Present Research Grant, Royal Historical Society, 2017
Fulbright Student Research Fellowship (Canada), U.S. Department of State, 2016
King’s College London Summer Research Grant, UNC Chapel Hill, 2015
Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, Graduate School, UNC Chapel Hill, 2015
Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant, Center for Global Initiatives, UNC Chapel Hill 2013
Research and Scholarly Interests
Modern Britain and the British Empire
Politics and political culture
Decolonization
Sub-Saharan Africa
Indigenous Canada
Oral history methodologies
Archives and collections development
Publications
Articles
“Dirty Documents and Illegible Signatures: Doctoring the Archive of British Imperialism and Decolonization,” Modern British History 35 (June 2024): 199-222.
“‘Sacred Trust’: Rethinking Late British Decolonization in Indigenous Canada,” Journal of British Studies 58 (July 2019): 565-597.
U.S. Government Publications
Our Greatest Strength: Navy Wives and the Manpower Crisis in the 1970s U.S. Navy (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2022).
With Erik Setzekorn, The Army Science Board: A History of Army-Civilian Collaboration in Science (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2022).
Book Reviews
Review of Kevin Hastings, Transatlantic Upper Canada: Portraits in Literature, Land, and British Indigenous Relations, in Journal of British Studies 62, no. 1 (2023).
Review of Geoffrey Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945, in Journal of Social History 48, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 980-982.