Samuel Truett
Associate Professor • U.S. West

Contact
email: truett@unm.edu
office: Mesa Vista 2097
office phone: (505) 277-6210
Profile
Professor Truett teaches courses on the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands (colonial era to the present), comparative North American and global borderlands, U.S. culture and “empire,” environmental history, and the history of New Mexico, and advises students in both U.S. and Latin American history. While his research to date has focused largely on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, his is also interested in the broader transnational legacies—social, cultural, and environmental—that link the U.S. to the Americas and world at large. His new research ranges across the map, including transnational studies of “globetrotters” from such places as Russia, England, Italy, and the Pacific Rim whose migrations into the U.S.-Mexico borderlands disrupted north-south binaries, and a history of the fascination with (and appropriations of) ruins and antiquity in U.S. expansionist borderlands in North America, Mexico, and Central America (from the eighteenth century forward). Dr. Truett devotes most of his energy as a teacher and scholar to sneaking across geographical and disciplinary borders, trying not to get busted by the academic migra, and helping others to develop the critical tools, historical curiosity, and enthusiasm to make border crossings central to their own intellectual journeys.
Education
B.A., Anthropology, University of Arizona, 1988
M.A., History, Yale University, 1992
Ph.D., History, Yale University, 1997
Research
U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History; Environmental History; Comparative Frontiers and Borderlands; Transnational History; Cultural and Social History; U.S. West and Mexico
Selected Publications
Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, co-edited with Elliott Young (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004)
"Epics of a Greater America: Herbert Eugene Bolton's Quest for a Transnational American History," in Christopher Schimidt-Nowara and John Nieto-Phillips, eds., Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005)
“Transnational Warrior: Emilio Kosterlitzky and the Transformation of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” in Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads (2004)
“Neighbors by Nature: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Environmental History in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” Environmental History 2:2 (April 1997), 160-78.
Awards
National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for Nature and History at the Nation’s Edge: Field Institute in Environmental and Borderlands History, NEH Summer Institute, (with Katherine Morrissey, PI, and Paul Hirt, and Marsha Weisiger, Principal Faculty Members), Summer 2009
Lloyd Lewis Fellowship in American History, The Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, 2008-2009
Center for New World Comparative Studies Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, Spring 2008
Feminist Research Institute Faculty Research Grant, UNM, Summer 2007
Bolton-Kinnaird Award in Borderlands History, Western History Association, 2006
Research Allocations Committee Small Research Grant, UNM, 2006
Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 2004-05
Snead-Wertheim Endowed Lectureship in Anthropology and History, UNM, 2001-02
J. William Fulbright Lectureship, University of Tampere, Finland, 2000-01
Courses
Hispanic Frontiers in North America
U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History
Comparative Frontiers and Borderlands
North American Borderlands History
Environmental History
Culture and Empire in North America
The Trans-Mississippi West
The Native American Southwest
History of New Mexico

