Steven Hackel earned his B.A. at Stanford University and his Ph.D. in American History from Cornell University with specializations in early America and the American West. From 1994–1996 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and a visiting Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary. He taught at Oregon State University from 1996 to 2007, and is now Professor of History at UC Riverside. Within the larger field of early American history, Dr. Hackel’s research specializes on the Spanish Borderlands, colonial California, and California Indians. He is especially interested in Indian responses to Spanish colonialism, the effects of disease on colonial encounters, and new ways of visualizing these processes through digital history. His first book, CHILDREN OF COYOTE, MISSIONARIES OF SAINT FRANCIS: INDIAN-SPANISH RELATIONS IN COLONIAL CALIFORNIA, 1769-1850 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005), garnered numerous national prizes. JUNÍPERO SERRA: CALIFORNIA’S FOUNDING FATHER (Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013) was named a top ten book for 2013 by Zócalo Public Square and the best book of the year on early California by the Historical Society of Southern California. Dr. Hackel has edited two volumes of essays and published nearly two dozen scholarly essays. He has also been awarded fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities and many other agencies.
