Michael Brescia

Michael M. Brescia (Ph.D. in History, University of Arizona) is Curator of Ethnohistory in the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, with faculty affiliations in the Department of History, James E. Rogers College of Law, Center for Latin American Studies, and the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. He is the co-author of two books that examine the broader historical forces that have shaped our continent from Pre-Columbian times to the present: the fourth edition of Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas (with W. Dirk Raat, University of Georgia Press, 2010), and North America: An Introduction (with John C. Super, University of Toronto Press, 2009).  His research on the living legacies of Spanish colonial and early Mexican law in the North American West has appeared in such journals as Western Legal History, The Public Historian, and Journal of the Southwest, among others, and he has served as lead curator of several exhibitions, including the award-winning Many Mexicos: Vistas de la Frontera. Michael’s scholarship has attracted broad recognition and support over the years, including, for example, the Dan Shilling Humanities Public Scholar Award from Arizona Humanities, a Fulbright that brought him to the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario, Canada) and the Biblioteca Palafoxiana (Puebla, Mexico), and visiting research fellowships at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia), El Colegio de San Luis (San Luis Potosí, Mexico), and the Autry Museum of the American West (Los Angeles, California).