Russell Cobb
Indigenous land histories
Jul. 17-Aug. 15, 2025
Dr. Russell Cobb is a writer, media producer, and professor at the University of Alberta, where he is the Coordinator of the Media Studies Program and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. His latest book is Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land (Beacon Press, 2024), selected as one of the best books of 2024 by Publishers Weekly. His book The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America’s Weirdest State (Bison Books) won a Director’s Special Merit Award from the Oklahoma Department of Libraries in 2021. His nonfiction writing has appeared in Slate, NPR, The New York Times, and The Nation, among other places. The 2018 Netflix film “Come Sunday” is based on his story “Heretics” for This American Life. He hosts a radio show and podcast called History X about history not on the syllabus.
Alejandra Dubcovsky
Indigenous Histories and Language Reclamation
Aug. 11-23, 2025
Alejandra Dubcovsky is a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. She received her BA and PhD from UC Berkeley, and a MLIS from San Jose State. She is the author of two award-winning books— Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (HUP 2016) and Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (YUP 2023)— and many articles focused on Indigenous history of the early American South. She is currently working on two collaborative language recovery and reclamation projects: Hebuano, which is focused on the Timucua language spoken in early Florida and Ticha, which works with community members and a team of linguists and historians in Oaxaca, Mexico and centers on Colonial Valley Zapotec.
Travis Meyer
Colonial Evangelization and Translation
Nov. 30-Dec. 13, 2025
Travis Meyer is a PhD candidate in history at Pennsylvania State University, working under the advisorship of Matthew Restall and Martha Few. Before pursuing his doctorate, he earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Brigham Young University and a master’s in history from Penn State. Broadly, his research centers on the translation and historical contextualization of Catholic texts written in Indigenous American languages, such as Nahuatl, K’iche’, and Kaqchikel. By doing so, he aims to identify how the religious traditions and lived experiences of Europeans and Indigenous people shaped their Catholic religiosity. His current project examines the influence of religious order affiliation on the presentation of Catholicism to Indigenous audiences living under Spanish colonial rule. While conducting research at the Helmerich Center, he plans to examine documents authored by Jesuits and Franciscans who taught Catholicism to Indigenous groups in colonial Mexico in order to identify the priorities, biases, and methods inherent in their evangelization.
Thomas Blakeslee
Black Fatherhood, Resistance, and Identity
Dec. 8-19, 2025
Thomas Blakeslee is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where he has served as a Teaching Fellow, Research Assistant, History Prize Instructor, and Pedagogy Fellow for the History Department. His scholarly interests include early and modern U.S. history, African American history, resistance movements, gender, and family, with a particular focus on the social and intellectual histories of Black fatherhood in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thomas’s work contributes to broader conversations in U.S. history, African American studies, and masculinity studies. As a short-term fellow at the Helmerich Center for American Research at the University of Tulsa, Thomas will conduct new research and expand parts of his dissertation into a series of articles.
Derek Baron
Geopolitics of Native Voices
May 11-25, 2026
Derek Baron (he/they) is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where they also teach in the Department of English. Derek received their Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the Department of Music at New York University in 2023, and is currently completing their first monograph, tentatively titled The Geopolitics of Voice: Music, Sound, and Law in the Native Nineteenth-Century. The book explores how Native intellectuals in the nineteenth century used figures of music, sound, and voice to articulate questions of political, social and legal form. It spans from the advent of the Cherokee Syllabary during the Cherokee political crisis of the early nineteenth century to young Native people’s strategic navigation of assimilationist music education at boarding schools around the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to materials on Cherokee political, linguistic, and music history, at the Helmerich Center Derek will be investigating various sources on local history for a second monograph on musical mediations of jurisdictional conflict and violence in northeastern Oklahoma.
