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Professor of History

I joined the Department of History at ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ in 2002, after receiving my PhD from Arizona State University.  Since then, I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses in U.S., Indigenous, Borderlands, Western, Environmental, and Public History.  I have chaired dissertation and master’s committees on topics as diverse as colonial era Spanish masculinity, gender and the bracero program, Indigenous-African relations in the early Florida borderlands, Native peoples and legal borderlands, and settler-colonial violence in nineteenth century New Mexico.  My first book, , was published in 2010 with the University of Arizona Press; and my second book, , came out in 2019 with the University of Massachusetts Press. Most recently, I published the collection (with Margo Tamez and Cynthia Bejarano), (Arizona, 2025).  Some of my articles and chapters include, “Land, Labor, and Leadership: The Political Economy of Hualapai Community Building,1910-1940,” in Brian Hosmer and Colleen O’Neil (Eds.)  (University Colorado, 2004); “At the Crossroads of Hualapai History, Memory, and American Colonization: Contesting Space & Place," in ; “Reflections from the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands on a ‘Border-Rooted’ Paradigm in Higher Education,” with Cynthia Bejarano, in Ethnicities, (January 2018); and, “Race, Blood, and Belonging: Transnational Blackfoot Bands and Families along the U.S. – Canada Border, 1870-1915,” in Pablo Mitchell and Katrina Jagodinsky (Eds.) , (The University of Kansas Press, 2018).  I am presently writing about the Apache Treaty of 1852; and the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site as an example of settler colonial memory making, racial violence, and the politics of historical commemoration.  In addition, I am the co-editor (with Myla Vicenti Carpio) of the book series, , through the University of Arizona Press.  I have received grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew H. Mellon Foundation, The Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University, and Texas Tech University.  I presently have a contract with the National Park Service to write about Indigenous peoples along the Camino Real, and I am a consultant for a museum exhibit highlighting Indigenous peoples in the borderlands.   

Curriculum Vitae 2026  

Contact Info:

Texas Western Hall 320Q

(915) 747-6805

Email: jpshepherd@utep.edu