Affiliated Students

Janet Marie Coen is a M.A. student in the history of Western America. She received a B.A. in English studies and a B.A. in history from UNM. She concentrates her work on the railroad industry and the race relations of African Americans within that industry. Janet is looking at how African Americans used their positions and advancements in their work with the railroads to extend to improvements and acceptance in a hegemonic society.

Zonnie Gorman is a member of the Navajo Nation and is a PhD candidate in History with a graduate minor in Museum Studies. Her interests include Navajo masculinity and identity, the intersection of Indigenous masculinities and twentieth century wars, and memory and memorialization. Zonnie is a professional longtime public historian, lecturer, and consultant on the Navajo Code Talkers.

Michelle M. Martin is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico. She earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in history at Western Michigan University. After graduation Martin embarked on a nearly twenty-year career in academic and public history. Her research interests include the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity in the U.S. West from 1800-1900, the history of Indigenous-white relations in the Indian Territory (in the Mvskoke and Semnvole Nations specifically) from 1840-1925, interracial marriage and families and gender and race based violence in the West.

Richard Maska works on the U.S.-Canada border in the northern Great Plains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is interested in how U.S. and Canadian officials, soldiers, police, capitalists, and settlers imposed a binational sociopolitical order onto an Indigenous geography. He received his M.A. at the University of Chicago (2017) and my B.A. at Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois (2017).

Carlyn N. Pinkins (BA, MA in History, Georgia Southern University) is a doctoral candidate whose research interests are African American history in the Southwest and Twentieth-Century North American Indigenous history. Her dissertation research explores black homesteading and settlement in the territory and state of New Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century.

Molly Twite is a M.A student in Latin America and the U.S West. She received her B.A in History from Simmons University in Boston, MA. Her work so far has been focused in public history, testimonios, and state- and nation- building in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also interested in oral history, and has previously done ethnographic work with a herding community in Khövsgöl, Mongolia.

Joseph Ukockis is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of New Mexico. He received his B.A. in History from the University of Arizona and his M.A. in History from Northern Arizona University. He began his studies in fall 2018 and started working as a graduate assistant at the Center for the Southwest in fall 2019. Much of his work has centered question about land, labor, and protest in the late nineteenth century, examining the role of the borderlands in United States and Mexican politics. Currently, his dissertation research examines the ways in which patterns of community interdependence shaped practices of colonial violence in Mescalero and Chiricahua homelands, from the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 to the “Apache Wars” of the nineteenth century.

Marie M. von Haas is a PhD Student of History at the University of New Mexico. Her research interests are focused on the Japanese within broader matrices of the American West and the United States. She also studies U.S. History and World War I & II. Her M.A. thesis drew from the experiences of her mother, a “Japanese War Bride” and herself, an “Occupation Baby” post- WWII. She earned her M.A. in Global History and the American West at the University of Colorado Denver and her B.A. in International Studies at the University of Colorado Denver.

Cassidy Zachary is a PhD student studying the little explored intersections of race, gender, and fashion in New Mexico's Spanish colonial and U.S. Territorial periods. Zachary's research uses clothing as both a methodology and a framework with which to better understand the clothed (and unclothed) body as a site of complex cultural exchanges, negotiations, and clashes in New Mexico's borderlands. A native New Mexican, Zachary holds a BFA in Costume Design from the University of New Mexico and an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.