The Many Faces of Habeas: Challenging Coercion and Confinement in the American West

Historian Katrina Jagodinsky to Deliver the 2023 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture

The Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico is pleased to announce the 2023 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture in Western History and Culture, which will take place Monday, March 20, 2023 from 5:00 to 6:30 pm in UNM Student Union Building, Ballroom C. The lecture will be given by Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky, Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who will speak on "The Many Faces of Habeas: Challenging Coercion and Confinement in the American West."

This event is FREE and OPEN to the public with a reception to follow from 6:30pm to 7:30 pm in the SUB Navajo Lounge.

The lecture will emphasize resistance narratives in legal spaces under the theme of habeas corpus, a constitutional protection against wrongful arrest or detainment. For thousands of petitioners in the US West between 1812 and 1924, habeas offered an opportunity to challenge wrongful arrest, detainment, and other inequalities. Jagodinsky’s lecture will relate the stories of Indigenous people's use of habeas corpus from Arizona north to Alaska and the Mississippi River west to the Pacific. The lecture stems from a larger initiative that Professor Jagodinsky heads in conjunction with the UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, "Petitioning For Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West." With NSF funding, Jagodinsky and the UNL Center for Digital Research are developing a robust open source and open access graph database with data from habeas corpus petitions to demonstrate the relationships of power in claims to freedom, and their significance and value within American jurisprudence.

Katrina Jagodinsky is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she leads two NSF-funded projects and is co-PI on a Mellon-funded project, which focus on Law and Race in American History. She brings her training in American Indian Studies and History at University of Arizona to bear on research in marginalized peoples' use of the American legal system over the long nineteenth century. She teaches courses on American legal history at UNL and regularly engages in academic talks and conferences around the country. She is the author of Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946  (Yale University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West, with Pablo Mitchell (University of Kansas Press, 2018).

Jagodinsky has also published a number of articles and essays that examine the efforts of Indigenous and mixed-race women and children to leverage the American legal system in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, and actively serves on committees for the American History Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Coalition for Western Women's History, and the Western History Association.

For more information about the 2023 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture, or other events sponsored by the Center for the Southwest, call 505-277-4344 or email us at cntrsw@unm.edu