Academic Board

Jon Beasley-Murray

PhD, Duke University
University of British Columbia, Department of Hispanic Studies, Associate Professor

Jon Beasley-Murray is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of British Columbia, who has written and researched extensively on political theory and social violence in Latin America. He is the author of Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America.

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Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

PhD, University of Wisconsin

Professor of History and History of Science and Medicine, University of Texas – Austin

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Cañizares-Esguerra got his PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Before UT, he taught at Illinois State University and SUNNY-Buffalo. He has also been a visiting professor in several universities outside the United States, including the Universidade Federal do Ouro Preto (Mariana- Brazil); the Universidade Etaduale de Campinas (Campinas-Brazil), the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá-Colombia); the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogota-Colombia); the FLACSO (Quito-Ecuador).

Cañizares-Esguerra has won numerous national fellowships given by the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment of the Humanities (at the John Carter Brown Library), the Andrew Mellon (at the Huntington Library), the Charles Warren Center of Studies of American History (at Harvard); the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; and the Donald D. Harrington Fellows Program (at the University of Texas). In 2010 Canizares-Esguerra was the Andrew Mellon Senior Fellow of the John Carter Brown Library.

Cañizares-Esguerra has received numerous prizes, including the 1999-2001 best article award from the Forum in the History of the Human Sciences of the History of Science Society; the 2001 AHA prize on Atlantic History; the 2001 AHA prize in Latin American and Spanish History; and the 2006-2007 biannual Honorable Mention of the Murdo MacLeod Book Prize of The Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. His How to Write the History of the New World was cited among the best books of the year (2001) by The Economist. It also made into the “best book of the year” lists of TLS and the Independent (London).

Cañizares-Esguerra is member of several journal editorial boards, including Atlantic Studies, The Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Early Modern History; Memoria y Sociedad, and Tierra Brasilensis. Countless times he has been an outside reviewer or national fellowships boards, university tenure and promotion committees, university presses, and professional journals. Cañizares-Esguerra has been invited by some 110 university and research institutions world-wide to give talks, delivering several keynote addresses and endowed lectures. Finally Cañizares-Esguerra has trained and is training numerous PhD students.

He is the author of more than 50 journal articles and book chapters and some 60 book reviews. He has also authored several books: How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford 2001–translated into Spanish and Portuguese); Puritan Conquistadors (Stanford 2006; translated into Spanish); Nature, Empire, and Nation (Stanford 2007); The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000 (co-edited, with Erik Seeman), and The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (co-edited with Jim Sidbury and Matt Childs). He is currently writing a book entitled Bible and Empire: The Old Testament in the Spanish Monarchy, from Columbus to the Wars of Independence.

Jason Dormady

PhD, University of California – Santa Barbara
University of Central Washington, Department of History, Associate Professor

Jason Dormady is a former farm worker, reporter and advertising designer, currently engaged as an Associate Professor of History at Central Washington University. He is also program Faculty in El Centro Latinx and the program for Latino and Latin American Studies at CWU. Dormady holds his BA in History from the University of Montana and his Masters and PhD in Mexican History from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, 1940 – 1968 and co-editor of Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands. His other articles interrogate issues of community and religions minorities in Mexican society. He is currently investigating issues relative to popular perceptions of urban growth and of the role played by women as property developers and entrepreneurs in Mexican society.

Rick Halpern

PhD, University of Pennsylvania
University of Toronto, Department of History, Professor

Rick Halpern is a social historian whose work has focused on race and labour in a number of national and international contexts.  His most recent publication, co-authored with Alex Lichtenstein, is Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid. He also has written about meat and meatpacking, sugar and plantations, and regionalism.  Currently he is researching the long interplay between photography, race, and class in the Canada and United States over the course of the twentieth century.  He is the Bissell-Heyd Chair of American Studies and, until July 2015, was the Dean and Vice Principal at UTSC.  Prior to that he was the Principal of New College on the St George campus.  Professor Halpern works with graduate students in a number of fields.

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Kenneth Mills

D. Phil, Oxford University
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Department of History, Professor

Before joining the faculty at Toronto, he was an Assistant and Associate Professor of History at Princeton University (1993-2003), where he also served as Director of the Program in Latin American Studies and (for two years, under the directorship of Anthony Grafton) as the Assistant to the Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Kenneth Mills is an anthropological historian of the early modern Spanish world and colonial Latin America, with an emphasis on religious and cultural transformation. He is currently writing a book about the transatlantic journey of Castilian image-maker and alms-gatherer Diego de Ocaña (c. 1570-1608), and preparing a series of lectures and workshops on “The Study of History Today” for Somaiya Vidyavihar in Mumbai, India, in January 2013.

His multi-disciplinary and multi-author Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, created and edited with art historian Evonne Levy, is in production with the University of Texas Press, and due out in 2013. His edited volume with Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Apocalipsis en el Nuevo Mundo: arte, profecía y mesianismo en Hispanoamérica (s. XVI-XVIII) / New World Revelations: Art, Prophecy and Messianism in the Early Modern Spanish World is currently being assembled.

His publications include An Evil Lost to View? (1994); Idolatry and Its Enemies: Extirpation and Colonial Andean Religion, 1640-1750 (1997; second paperback edition 2012); Colonial Spanish America (1998) with William B. Taylor; Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (2002) with William B. Taylor and Sandra Lauderdale Graham; Kenneth Mills with Anthony Grafton, ed., Conversion: Old Worlds and New (2003) and Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (2003). He has held research fellowships at the National Humanities Center, John Carter Brown Library, and Institute for Advanced Study and has received grant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2011, Kenneth Mills was Visiting Professor at the Centre de la Méditerrannée Moderne et Contemporaine at the Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis in Nice, France. Professor Mills has served on the editorial board of Colonial Latin American Review (New York, USA) since 1998, and he additionally serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research (Sydney, Australia) and the Comite Consultativo of Nueva Corónica (Lima, Peru). He is a member of the Academic Council of Somaiya Vidyavihar (Mumbai, India).

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Ian Rocksborough-Smith

PhD, University of Toronto
Assistant Professor, University of the Fraser Valley, Department of History

Ian Rocksborough-Smith teaches North American and Global history at the University of the Fraser Valley and Douglas College in British Columbia. His primary research interests include the study of late 19th and 20th Century United States, public history, urban studies, and histories of race, religion, and empire in the Atlantic world. He has published in The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Harvard University’s African American National Biography, The Journal of American Studies of Turkey and The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. His book is now available for order from the University of Illinois Press entitled: Black Public History in Chicago (April/May 2018).

Ian has received numerous Canadian government and university fellowships and scholarships, including a Fulbright scholarship and a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral grant. He has also presented his research at major academic conferences in both Canada and the U.S. Ian has taught North American and Global history on both coasts of Canada and in Toronto. He engages students through multiple literacies and learning styles.