News

Posted:  Mar 11, 2022 - 12:00am

Please join the Center for the Southwest and the History Department in welcoming two new faculty members!

Katherine Massoth

“I am excited to be sharing my passion for researching and teaching about the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and the Southwest in the exact space and land in which my writing and passion sit.” 

Katherine Massoth is an Assistant Professor of History specializing in North America, the U.S. West and Southwest, and U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, from the Spanish Colonial era through the nineteenth century. As a historian of the Americas, she teaches history courses on women and gender, borderlands, the American West, and Chicanx/Latinx studies. Her interdisciplinary and intersectional approach embraces several themes: gender roles, foodways, domesticity, cultural and ethnic identities, transborder networks, and gender and raced legal systems. She incorporates digital humanities and oral history into her teaching and community engagement.

Dr. Massoth received her Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Iowa and previously held an appointment in the Department of History at the University of Louisville, where she was affiliated Latin American and Latino Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. At the University of Iowa, she was a founding member of History Corps, a digital humanities and oral history project that demonstrates how the humanities affect everyone’s lives. At the University of Louisville, she helped establish the Louisville Latinx Oral History project. Her book manuscript, “Keeping House: The Borders of Gender Roles, Cultural Practices, and Domesticity in Territorial Arizona and New Mexico,” brings light to the persistent roles of women in shaping daily politics in the North American Southwest after U.S. annexation in 1848. She also has a forthcoming article in the Journal of Arizona History entitled “Engendering the Long Nineteenth Century and Mapping Gender on Arizona History.”

Holly Miowak Guise

“In addition to participating in the Center for the Southwest, I am excited to join the group of Indigenous scholars on campus at UNM.” 

Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) is an Assistant Professor in History whose work on gender, internment, and wartime Alaska situates Alaska within studies of the American West, the Pacific, and 20^th century U.S. Her research methods bridge archives, tribal archives, community-based research, and oral histories with Alaska Native elders and veterans. Dr. Guise is looking forward to teaching a Native Women’s History graduate seminar this fall and aims to make her classroom a welcoming space for students while building historical analysis and critical thinking skills.

Dr. Guise received her PhD in History at Yale University. Her manuscript in progress, “World War II and the First Peoples of the Last Frontier: Alaska Native Voices and Wartime Alaska” focuses on gender, Aleut relocation and internment, Native activism, and Indigenous military service during the war. She has received funding for her research from the Ford Foundation, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Western History Association’s Walter Rundell Award, and the American Philosophical Society.