President: Miguel La Serna
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
laserna@email.unc.edu
Miguel La Serna is professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is also department chair. He is interested in the relationship between culture, memory, and political violence in twentieth-century Latin America. He has published numerous studies on the political violence of late-20th century Peru, and is currently working on a project that puts Andean insurgencies in global perspective. His publications include With Masses and Arms: Peru’s Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2020); The Shining Path: Love, Madness and Revolution in the Andes (co-authored with Orin Starn) (WW Norton & Company, 2019); and The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
Past-President: Christina Snyder
Pennsylvania State University
christina.snyder@gmail.com
Christina Snyder is the McCabe-Greer Professor of History at The Pennsylvania State University. 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’s research focuses on North America, and especially the Southeast, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Snyder is the author of Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) and Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Harvard, 2010). These books received a wide range of accolades, including the Francis Parkman Prize, the John H. Dunning 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, the National Humanities Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
President-elect: Stephen Warren
University of Iowa
stephen-warren@uiowa.edu
The American Society for Ethnohistory has influenced my entire career. Inspired by Loretta Fowler, Raymond DeMallie, and Helen Tanner to conduct archival research through an ethnographically informed lens, I have worked with Native nations in Oklahoma for decades.
I devoted two monographs and one edited volume to the Shawnee people, and co-edited (with Chief Ben Barnes, Shawnee Tribe) Replanting Cultures: Community Engaged Scholarship in Indian Country. My book-length monograph about how the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma experienced the boundaries of rights and citizenship is nearing completion. Next, I’ll explore how food sovereignty practitioners in the Great Lakes region are counteracting the legacy of dispossession and removal.
In addition to teaching at the University of Iowa, I am an avid gardener and biker, and enjoy family life with my partner, Kristy, and our three children.
I hope to build on our founding principles: nurturing junior scholars, expanding the geographic scope of our meetings and broadening the focus of Ethnohistory. Since the journal’s launch in 1954, the society has expanded its scope from the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley to embrace all of the Americas. In these uncertain times, I believe we should not limit our expertise or audience to the diminishing number of colleges and universities that formally support Native American Studies. The ASE can do more to welcome scholars and audiences of Indigenous descent, supporting mutually beneficial relationships between academic institutions and tribal governments and Native scholar-advocates.
My expertise in community-engaged scholarship and Indigenous histories has given me perspective on the ASE’s past, present, and future. Our many challenges include:
- securing and increasing financial support for early-career scholars
- implementing guidelines for ethical and reciprocal engagement with Indigenous communities in and beyond the United States
- formalizing hybrid meetings that enable society members to nurture scholarship around the world
- promoting and supporting women and Indigenous leaders
- creating and safeguarding a welcoming environment for all
The ASE’s founder, Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, battled misogyny throughout her career. Yet our society was the first to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history, leading to new discoveries in Native American Studies.
Executive Director: Martin Nesvig
University of Miami
mnesvig@miami.edu
Martin Nesvig (Ph.D., Yale, 2004) is Professor of History at the University of Miami and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His work examines tensions between imperial rule and everyday expressions of popular culture and behaviors in colonial Mexico. He is author of Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (Yale, 2009), Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain (Texas, 2018), and editor of three anthologies on local religion and Franciscan thought. His most recent book, The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge, 2025), examines the processes whereby non-native women integrated Mesoamerican metaphysics, medicine (tiçiyotl), and cosmology into their own Iberian, Canarian, and African magical-healing practices. He has worked on other topics such as peyote use among Spaniards, mestizos, and mulatas; Nahuatl language acquisition among lay Spaniards; and Nahuatl loan-word integration in the lexicon of Mexican Spanish. Previously he served as president of the Southeast Council for Latin American Studies (2022-2023); the U.S.-Canada President for the XV Reunión de Historiadores de México (2014-2018); and on the editorial board of Ethnohistory (2009-2012).
Treasurer: Dana Velasco Murillo
University of California, San Diego
dvmurillo@ucsd.edu
I earned my Ph.D. at UCLA and am currently National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (2025-2026). I am a social and ethnohistorian of early modern Latin America. My research focuses on recovering the histories of the non-elite groups of colonial Mexico’s northern silver mining district, especially native people and women.
My current interests include my second book project, The Chichimeca Arc: War, Peace, and Resettlement in America’s First Borderlands, 1546-1616. Chichimeca Arc recovers the history of nomadic indigenous peoples in the development and consolidation of New Spain’s sixteenth-century empire. My most recent work includes an anthology, Overlooked Places and Peoples: Indigenous and African Confrontations and Collaborations in the Spanish Empire (Routledge 2024), which I co-edited with Robert Schwaller.
Prior to my appointment at UC San Diego, I was assistant professor of Latin American History at Adelphi University and UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine.
Council Members
Molly H. Bassett
Georgia State University
mbassett@gsu.edu
Molly Bassett is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA on the traditional and unceded lands of the Mvskoke people. Her work focuses on concepts of deity and deity embodiment in Nahua religious traditions, and her second book, a study of tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles), will be published by the University of Texas Press in 2026. Molly is co-editing a special issue on Indigenous epistemologies and the study of religion for Method and Theory in the Study of Religion with Métis scholar of religions Paul Gareau. She serves on the Nahuatl Scholars Association board and as Chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Applied Religious Studies Committee.
Alejandra Dubcovsky
University of California, Riverside
adubcovs@ucr.edu
Alejandra Dubcovsky is a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She received her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley, and a MLIS from San Jose State. She is the author of two award-winning books— Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard UP 2016) and Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP 2023)— and many articles focused on Indigenous history of the early American South. She is currently working on two collaborative language recovery and reclamation projects: Hebuano, which is focused on the Timucua language spoken in early Florida (https://hebuano.com/ ) and Ticha, which works with community members and a team of linguists and historians in Oaxaca, Mexico and centers on Colonial Valley Zapotec.
Jamie Myers
University of North Carolina – Pembroke
jamie.mize@uncp.edu
Jamie Myers 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.
Margaret Ellen Newell
Ohio State University
newell.20@osu.edu
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State University. Her most recent book, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press), won the 2016 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book on the history of race relations in the U.S., and the 2016 Peter Gomes Memorial Prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her recent articles include “’The Rising of the Indians’; Or, the Native American Revolution of (16)’76,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 80 (April 2023); “Sarah Chauqum: Eighteenth Century Rhode Island and Connecticut,” in As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, ed. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, and Terri Snyder (Cambridge University Press, 2020); “In the Borderlands of Race and Freedom (and Genre): Embedded Indian and African Slave Testimony in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in French and British America, 1700-1848 ed. Sophie White and Trevor Burnard (Routledge, 2020). Presently, she is Principal Investigator for a multiyear research project on African American and Native American citizenship, 1780-1930.
Nominating Committee
John Bickers
Case Western Reserve University
john.bickers@case.edu
John Bickers is the Jesse Hauk Shera Assistant Professor in the History Department at Case Western Reserve University and a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. His research focuses Indigenous nationhood and political organization in the nineteenth century. His book manuscript, The Miami Nation: A Middle Path for Indigenous Nationhood, is a political history of the Miami Tribe examining the ways in which the nation constructed a new political order that existed between the dichotomies of coercive nation-states and village autonomy, assimilation and traditionalism, and military resistance and accommodation.
Edward Polanco
Virginia Tech
polanco@vt.edu
Edward Anthony Polanco is a Kuskatanchanej scholar of Mesoamerica. He is an associate professor at Virginia Tech (which occupies a portion of the Monacan Indian Nation’s territory), where he also serves as the Director of the Indigenous Studies program. He is committed to serving and amplifying the voices of all Indigenous people, especially those from Turtle Island and Abya Yala. https://eapolanco.com/
Journal Editors
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.
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.