Faculty and Staff
Frederick Hoxie
Swanlund Professor of History
Professor Hoxie is Swanlund Professor of History; he is affiliated also with the College of Law and the university’s American Indian Studies program. A specialist in U.S. and Native American history, Dr. Hoxie’s courses include undergraduate courses in American History, a two-semester survey course on the history of Native Americans, upper level courses in American Indian law, “Natives and Newcomers” (a comparative look at indigenous peoples and European expansion), and other special topics. He regularly offers graduate seminars in Native American history and ethnohistorical approaches to the past.
Dr. Hoxie came to Illinois in 1998 from the Newberry Library, a private research library in Chicago, where he had served as Vice President for Research and Education. At the Newberry, he developed programs for scholars, students and teachers that promoted the study of the Native American past and administered an internationally-acclaimed research and fellowship program for scholars in all fields. He also oversaw the Library’s exhibits and programs for the general public. These programs were supported by a variety of foundations and government agencies, including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Hoxie received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College in 1969 and his Ph.D. degree from Brandeis University in 1977. He is the recipient of honorary degrees from Amherst College (1994) and Long Island University (2000). He taught at Antioch College from 1977 to 1983 and from 1986 to 1998 was an Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University. His publications include A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the American Indians, 1880-1920 (1984), The Crows (1989), Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805-1935 (1995), The Encyclopedia of North American Indians (1996), Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices From the Progressive Era (2001) and The People: A History of native America (2007). In 2007, the University of Illinois Press published Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country: The Native American Perspective, edited by Hoxie and a former student, Jay T. Nelson. That book grew out of an exhibit of the same name, curated by Hoxie, which is currently on a twelve-city national tour.
Professor Hoxie has served as a consultant and expert witness to the U. S. Department of Justice, the U. S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux Tribes and Little Big Horn College. He is general editor of The American Indians, a 23-volume series of books published by Time-Life which has sold over two million copies and series editor (with Neal Salisbury) for Cambridge Studies in American Indian History, published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Hoxie is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, and has served on the boards of Amherst College, the Illinois Humanities Council and the Organization of American Historians. He is the former president of the American Society for Ethnohistory and has held fellowships from the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities.