Departmental Faculty
William Beezley beezley@u.arizona.edu
William Beezley teaches and researches in modern Latin American history. Co-director of the Oaxaca Summer institute in Modern Mexican History, Beezley has published widely on the cultural history of Mexico (Judas at the Jockey Club; Mexican National Identity: Memory, Innuendo and Popular Culture) and on twentieth-century Mexico (Mexicans in Revolution, 1910-1946; El Gran Pueblo).
Juan Garcia jugarcia@email.arizona.edu
Juan Garcia’s research centers on Mexican immigration and community development in the United States, especially before World War II. He has published work on Mexican immigration to the Midwest, the Bracero Program, the deportation and repatriation of Mexicans, and the history of literary and media images of Hispanics.
Kevin Gosner kgosner@email.arizona.edu
Kevin Gosner’s research interests focus on the colonial history of southern Mexico and Guatemala, especially rural political economy and Maya ethnohistory. Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion, is a study of the Tzeltal Revolt of 1712 in highland Chiapas. His current projects examine the colonial cotton economy, the mobilization of Maya labor (especially women), and the participation of entrepreneurial-minded native elites.
Katherine Morrissey kmorriss@u.arizona.edu
Katherine Morrissey’s research on the 19th and 20th-century North American West focuses on the region’s environmental, social, cultural, and intellectual history. Her related publications include Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire, Border Spaces: Visualizing the US-Mexico Frontera, and articles on western women’s history, regionalism, cultural representations, mining and environmental change.
Roger Nichols nichols@email.arizona.edu
A scholar of the history of American settlement, Western America, and Indians in American history, emeritus professor Roger Nichols’ publications include Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History and Black Hawk and the Warrior's Path. Among his current book projects is a study of Europeans’ fascination with American Indians.
Erika Perez erikaperez@email.arizona.edu
As her recent book, Colonial Intimacies: Interethnic Kinship, Sexuality, and Marriage in Southern California, 1769-1885, demonstrates, Erika Perez' scholarship explores empire-building projects, and identity-formation and negotiations by people of mixed descent. A historian of the American West and the Spanish Borderlands, she maintains an interest in indigenous histories of resistance and cultural survival throughout early North America.
Tyina Steptoe tsteptoe@email.arizona.edu
A historian of race, gender and culture, Tynia Steptoe's recent book Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City examines how the migration of Creoles of color, ethnic Mexicans and black east Texans complicated notions of race in 20th-century Houston. She is currently working on a project that examines the history of rhythm and blues music through the lens of race and sexuality.
Jeremy Vetter vetter@email.arizona.edu
Jeremy Vetter works at the intersection of environmental history and history of science and technology in the American West. His publications include Field Life: Science in the American West during the Railroad Era and Knowing Global Environments: New Historical Perspectives on the Field Sciences. Other research interests include the history of the food system, the involvement of lay people in the field sciences, and the history of science in the national parks
Related Faculty
The University of Arizona includes an impressive array of scholars who study the North American West. Listed below are some of the faculty members with whom history graduate students have recently worked.
Michael Brescia (Arizona State Museum) brescia@email.arizona.edu
Michael Brescia is associate curator of ethnohistory at Arizona State Museum and he teaches courses on Mexico and Spanish borderlands history, and North American History for the History department. His research interests include the legacies of Spanish and Mexican water law in the southwest U.S., religious identities in colonial Mexico, and paleography and translation. He is the co-author of North America: An Introduction (2008).
Geta LeSeur (Africana Studies) getal@email.arizona.edu
Geta LeSeur’s research in African Diaspora studies includes studies of the lives of Black migrant women. The author of Not All Okies are White: The Lives of Black Cotton Pickers in Arizona, LeSeur is currently working on a monograph of three black migrant women in Arizona’s Casa Grande Valley.
Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (American Indian Studies)
Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (Hopi) is a Professor of American Indian Studies. His publications include Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain between Indian and American and Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929.
Sarah J. Moore (Art History) sjm@email.arizona.edu
Sarah Moore teaches American and European Art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of, among other writings, John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art 1880-1915 (2003) and “No Woman's Land: Arizona Adventures,” in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945. Her research interests include turn-of-the-twentieth century visual culture of the United States, with an emphasis on national identity, institutional history, and art in the public sphere.
Judy Temple (Women’s Studies, English) jtemple@email.arizona.edu
Judy Temple’s work focuses on American women's literature, diaries, and Southwestern literature. Her publications include Baby Doe Tabor: The Madwoman in the Cabin (2007) and “A Secret to Be Burried”: The Diary and Life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858-1888.