Michael M. Brescia (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is curator of ethnohistory in the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, and a professor of history at the University of Arizona. His research examines the living legacies of Spanish colonial law in North America, particularly the ecological contexts of property rights. He is co-author of two books, the fourth edition of Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas (University of Georgia Press, 2010, with W. Dirk Raat), and North America: An Introduction (University of Toronto Press, 2009, with John C. Super), and Michael has served as guest editor of two special issues: “The Long View of Arizona History,” The Smoke Signal 110/111 (April 2022), and “The Historian as Expert Witness,” The Public Historian 37, no. 1 (February 2015). He is the recipient of the 2021 Dan Shilling Humanities Public Scholar Award, given by Arizona Humanities, and the 2014 Jerome Braun Prize in Western Legal History, given by the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society. His exhibit, Many Mexicos: Vistas de la Frontera, was awarded the 2012 Leadership in History Award of Merit by the American Association for State and Local History. In 2019, Michael was Visiting Research Fellow in the T.C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia), and Visiting Professor and Researcher at El Colegio de San Luis, A.C., San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He also held a research fellowship at the Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, California, and in 2011-2012, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, and the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, Puebla, Mexico. Michael’s research project at Princeton University will bring him to the Rare Books and Manuscripts department in the Firestone Library, where he will examine sources related to late medieval and early modern Spanish property law and natural resource usages.