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.
Past-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).
President-elect: 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).
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: 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: 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.
Council Member: 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.
Nominations Committee Member: Abelardo de la Cruz
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
dlacruz@unc.edu
Nominations Committee Member: Rebecca Kugel
University of California, Riverside
rebecca.kugel@ucr.edu
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.