New Faculty in History, 2007-2008

R. Jovita Baber
Assistant Professor of History

Professor R. Jovita Baber has a PhD in Latin American history (2005) from the University of Chicago, where she was awarded a Mellon lectureship to teach Latin American history while she was still a graduate student. She comes to us from Texas A&M University, where she taught world history and a variety of Latin American history courses at several levels of the curriculum.

Professor Baber's research aims to revise longstanding narratives of Latin American history that paint native peoples either as collaborators or victims. It is also characterized by a commitment to ethnohistory "from the ground up." Her dissertation, The Construction of Empire: Politics, Law and Community in Tlaxcala, New Spain, 1521-1640, makes a persuasive and original case for the ways in which native peoples actively participated in the creation of the Iberian empire, in part through their engagement with systems of law, in part through their appropriation of a variety of political and diplomatic strategies both at the edges of empire and in the Spanish metropole as well. Baber's archival experience is impressive - not only has she worked in Mexico but also in Seville - and her determination to materialize the agency of indigenous subjects is matched by her consideration of the different communities in native society drawn into dialogue with the ecclesiastical state.

In fall 2007, Professor Baber is slated to teach History 507, "Recovering the Voices of the Colonized: Trends in Latin American Ethnohistory."

 

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert
Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies & History

Jointly appointed in American Indian Studies and History, Matthew Gilbert is interested in both the past in the ways in which Native Americans remember and commemorate their histories. His current
scholarly focus is the history of federal Indian education at his home community, the Hopi reservation, particularly the experience of Hopi boys and girls who were taken a century ago to the Sherman Institute, a school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in Riverside, California. Gilbert is also interested in his community's memory of the past and has developed a substantial community archive of information about Hopi people and education. He has conducted numerous oral history interviews with tribal elders and circulated historical documents to the descendants of boarding school students. A significant outgrowth of this interest in "public history" is "Beyond the Mesas," a documentary film on the Hopi boarding school experience, which was broadcast on public television in 2007.

Matt's history courses include History 200, Introduction to Historical Interpretation, History 278, Native Americans in the U.S. Since 1850, and History 476, the History of the American West.