Summer History Talks: Spiritual Geographies and Imperial Borderlands in the Sonoran Desert

Cynthia Radding is the Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Latin American Studies at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her scholarship is rooted in the imperial borderlands of the Spanish and Portuguese American empires, emphasizing the role of indigenous peoples and other colonized groups in shaping those borderlands, transforming their landscapes, and producing colonial societies. She is past President of the Conference on Latin American History (2011-2013) affiliated with the American Historical Association; she served as book review editor of Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR, 2012-2017) and on the Editorial Boards of American Historical Review, HAHR and The Americas and on the Advisory Council of the Inter-American Foundation. Cynthia Radding is co-editor of the Borderlands of the Iberian World with Danna Levin Rojo, a multi-authored Oxford University Press Handbook (2019). Her publications include Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005; Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers (Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850), Durham: Duke University Press, 1997; Borderlands in World History, co-edited with Chad Bryant and Paul Readman (Palgrave, 2014); Bountiful Deserts. Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain (University of Arizona Press, 2022).