President: Cynthia Radding
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
radding@email.unc.edu
Dr. Cynthia Radding is the Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor of History and Latin American Studies at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her scholarship is rooted in the imperial borderlands of the Spanish and Portuguese American empires, emphasizing the role of indigenous peoples and other colonized groups in shaping those borderlands, transforming their landscapes, and producing colonial societies. She is an international corresponding member of the Academia Mexicana de Historia; she served as book review editor of Hispanic American Historical Review and on the Editorial Boards of American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, and The Americas. Radding is also President of the Board of Directors of the Americas Research Network. She is co-editor of the Borderlands of the Iberian World with Danna Levin Rojo, a Oxford University Press Handbook (2019). Her publications include Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic, 2005 (published in Spanish 2005, 2008); Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers (Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850), 1997 (published in Spanish, 2016); Borderlands in World History, co-edited with Chad Bryant and Paul Readman (2014); and Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain (2022).
Past-President: Nicole St-Onge
University of Ottawa
nstonge@uottowa.ca
Nicole St-Onge received a BA (Anthropology) from Trent University and an MA in Anthropology and PhD in History from the University of Manitoba. Currently she is a full professor in the department of History at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on French Canadien voyageurs, Great Lakes fur trade communities and Plains Métis buffalo hunters. Some of her publications include “Familial Foes?: French-Sioux Families and Plains Métis Brigades in the Nineteenth Century” The American Indian Quarterly 39, 3 (2015), 302-337; “‘He was neither a soldier nor a slave: he was under the control of no man’ : Kahnawake Mohawks in the Northwest Fur Trade, 1790-1850” Canadian Journal of History 51(1), (2016) 1-32; B. Macdougall & N. St-Onge, “Métis in the Borderlands of the Northern Plains in the Nineteenth Century,” J. O’Brien & C. Andersen (eds), Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (Routledge, 2017); and « Le poste de La Pointe sur l’île Madeline, tremplin vers le monde franco-anichinabé de la traite des fourrures », Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 73 (1-2), 13-43 (2019).
President-elect: Christina Snyder
The Pennsylvania State University
czs398@psu.edu
Christina Snyder is the McCabe Greer Professor of History at The Pennsylvania State University. She is an historian of colonialism, race, and slavery, with a focus on Native North America. Snyder earned her A.B. in Anthropology from the University of Georgia and her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Snyder is the author of Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2010). These books received a wide range of accolades, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the John H. Dunning Prize, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize, and the John C. Ewers Prize. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the National Humanities Center.
Executive Director: Peter B. Villella
US Air Force Academy
director@ethnohistory.org
Peter B. Villella received a BA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from UCLA. He is currently an Associate Professor of History at the US Air Force Academy, where he teaches Latin American and World History. He is the author of Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2016); co-editor (with Pablo García Loaeza) of The Conquest of Mexico: 500 Years of Reinventions (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2022); and co-editor and -translator (with Amber Brian, Brad Benton, and Pablo García Loaeza) of History of the Chichimeca Nation: Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Seventeenth-Century Chronicle of Ancient Mexico (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2019). His work has been supported by the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he serves as a Contributing Editor for the Mesoamerican section of the Library of Congress’s Handbook of Latin American Studies. His current research examines the meaning and relevance of “Aztec” history within the culture and politics of Spanish-ruled Mexico.
Treasurer: Shawn Austin
University of Arkansas
saustin1@uark.edu
Shawn Austin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay (University of New Mexico Press, 2020), which shows that the Spanish conquest of Paraguay was a prolonged transcultural encounter in which Guaraní imposed their kinship practices on Spaniards, who in turn applied Guaraní kinship norms to colonial institutions, including the practice of African slavery. His article, “Guaraní Kinship and the Encomienda in Colonial Paraguay,” published in Colonial Latin American Review, won the 2017 Franklin Pease G.Y. Memorial Prize. His current research draws on Jesuit and Guaraní-language sources to examine Guaraní’s creation of a plaza de armas in mission towns and their use of firearms and formal militias to defend themselves from their enemies and to negotiate a unique vassalage with the Spanish king marked by self-rule and mutual support.
Council Member: Alex Hidalgo
Texas Christian University
a.hidalgo@tcu.edu
Alex Hidalgo is associate professor of Latin American history at Texas Christian University. An interest in spatial history and the visual modes used to communicate across cultures guided his first book, Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019). Hidalgo’s articles in the American Historical Review, Ethnohistory, and the Hispanic American Historical Review have analyzed the materiality of colonial books, Mixtec and Nahua botanical knowledge used to make colorants, and the colonization of Aztec voices. He is at work on a second monograph that considers the way ethnic diversity and racial difference influenced understanding of sound and listening in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City. His research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the Library of Congress. As an active member of the Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography and the Bibliographical Society of America, he has helped forge ties between scholars, curators, archivists, and librarians from Latin America and the US.
Council Member: Julie Reed
The Pennsylvania State University
jlr6454@psu.edu
Council Member: Brett Rushforth
University of Oregon
bhrush@uoregon.edu
Brett Rushforth is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He is a scholar of the early modern Atlantic world whose research focuses on Indigenous North America, comparative slavery, and French colonialism and empire. He is the author of Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, which examines the enslavement of Indigenous Americans by French colonists and their Native allies, tracing the dynamic interplay between Native systems of captivity and slavery and French plantation-based racial slavery. He has just completed, with Christopher Hodson, a book titled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Crusading to the Age of Revolutions, which explores the relationships between Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans across four centuries, from roughly 1400 through Haitian independence in 1804.
Council Member: Amara Solari
The Pennsylvania State University
als66@psu.edu
Amara Solari is Professor of Art History and Anthropology at Penn State. An object-based ethnohistorian, her research focuses on processes of cultural, visual, and theological interchange between Indigenous communities and European settler-colonists of New Spain and the manifestation of these discourses in the material world. Centered on the Yucatec Maya people and Catholic evangelism, Dr. Solari has published multiple articles, several co-authored texts, and two monographs. The most recent book, Idolizing Mary: Maya-Catholic Icons in Yucatán, Mexico, investigates early modern conceptions of contagious disease and their intersection with Indigenous religion, using Maya-venerated cults of the Virgin Mary to understand the development of Yucatecan religiosity. She is working on a number of collaborative book-length projects, including a monograph on early modern mural painting in Yucatán, a project for which she serves as the lead PI of a three-year collaborative grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Nominations Committee Member: Dominique Polanco
Virginia Tech University
depolanco@vt.edu
Dominique E. Polanco is an Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin American art in the department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. She received her BA from Pitzer College, her MA from UC, Riverside, and her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. Dr. Polanco’s research focuses on Indigenous manuscripts, particularly those painted by Nahua tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) in sixteenth-century Mexico. Her investigations engage with decolonial and settler-colonial theory, Mesoamerican codicology, Indigenous recordkeeping, and colonial collecting. Currently she is completing a book manuscript that analyzes the creation, collection, and reproduction of the Pintura del gobernador, alcaldes, regidores de México (popularly known as the Codex Osuna) in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. Along with Nicholas R. Jones and Christina H. Lee, Dr. Polanco is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Race in the Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production. Her research has been supported by various sources, including the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, the Andrew W. Mellon Summer Institute in Spanish Paleography, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, and most recently the Bibliographical Society of America’s Pine Tree Foundation Fellowship in Hispanic Bibliography, as well as the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing’s Research Development Grant for BIPOC Scholars. Through her teaching, research, and writing, Dr. Polanco uplifts the voices of BIPOC scholars, students, and community members.
Nominations Committee Member: Jamie Mize
University of North Carolina – Pembroke
jamie.mize@uncp.edu
Jamie Myers Mize is an associate professor of history and American Indian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where she has earned accolades for teaching, undergraduate mentorship, and allyship. Her forthcoming book, Cherokee Men: Masculinity and Gendered Power, explores Cherokee masculinity and how gender expectations informed men’s political decisions in response to the pressures of colonialism. She is also the co-editor for an upcoming anthology entitled Gender in the Native South: A Reinterpretation of Women, Men, and Two-Spirit Peoples Before 1850. In addition to her service to the Society, she also serves on the editorial board for the Native South journal.
Journal Editor: Robert C. Schwaller
University of Kansas
schwallr@ku.edu
Robert C. Schwaller is an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. He received his Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the history of race and the experiences of African and Afro-descended individuals in early Spanish America. His book Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016) examines the development of racial categories in early New Spain. His research has appeared in The Americas, The Journal of Social History, and Rechtsgeschichte/Legal History among other journals.
Journal Editor: Denise Bossy
University of North Florida
denise.bossy@unf.edu
Dr. Denise Bossy is associate professor of history at the University of North Florida. She received her AB from Princeton University and her PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on the early Native South and local, public, and digital Indigenous history. Her prior editorial experiences include editing the prize-winning book The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina and co-editing Indigenous Florida, the prize-winning special issue of The Florida Historical Quarterly. Her current book project Yamasee (Yvmvse): Indigenous Mobility and Power in the Early South is the first exhaustive study of this influential Indigenous nation. Forthcoming with the Omohundro Institute, University of North Carolina Press, this work was funded by a NEH fellowship and focuses on the Yamasees’ use of mobility and place-making to navigate Spanish, Scottish, and English colonialism. She is beginning work on a public-facing Indigenous history of Northeast Florida with archaeologist Dr. Keith Ashley, which includes a digital companion site: indigenousflorida.com. She is P.I. for the three-year NEH collaborative research grant that supports this new book project.
Web Liaison: Peter B. Villella
US Air Force Academy
director@ethnohistory.org
Peter B. Villella is working with 720media in the management of this website.