Description:

This year's Nao Lecture will feature Tatiana Seijas from Penn State University, who will speak about indigenous peoples' confrontation with 19th Century European colonialism, with a focus on the economic and social lives of people who lived in Spain's imperial frontiers, including the Philippine Islands and New Mexico.

This event is co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program, the Initiative for Comparative Race and Diaspora, and the Latin American Studies Working Group (Buffett Institute for Global Studies).

A reception will follow.

Seijas' Biography:
As a historian, I aim to cross historiographical and geographical frontiers and to reconstruct the everyday experiences of people who were born without the privileges of power. I want to include their stories in the historical narratives of the "early modern" period and nineteenth century, when indigenous peoples around the world confronted European colonialism. More specifically, I focus on the economic and social lives of people who lived in Spain's imperial frontiers, including the Philippine Islands and New Mexico. I do so in order to expand the traditional geographic scope of Latin American history and to re-examine the trajectories of empires from a truly global perspective.

Among my current projects is a monograph titled “First Routes: Indigenous Trade and Travel in Early North America” that recovers the history of native merchants who forged routes of exchange between the Rio Grande Valley and the Mesoamerican highlands from circa 1400 to the late 1800s. Another is a book on coastal exchanges around the Pacific Basin.

Before coming to Penn State, I was Assistant Professor of History at Miami University.