The Department of History is pleased to introduce Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky as the first Jack & Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History.

Jagodinsky is a legal historian and the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska Lincoln. She holds a PhD in History and MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on women’s creative and critical uses of the law in the long nineteenth century as they countered the expansion of empire, misogyny, and racial hierarchies in personal and political contexts throughout the North American West. In addition to many articles, she is author of the award-winning book, Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran & Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 (Yale University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Beyond the Borders of Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West (University Press of Kansas, forthcoming 2018).

As the 2019 Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SFU, Jagodinsky will teach a course in comparative legal histories of race, gender, and empire, and offer a public forum featuring Indigenous women’s anti-colonial activism in the past and present. Jagodinsky will also conduct research on her current book project, examining women’s habeas corpus petitions and borderlands legal strategies in nineteenth-century British Columbia and Washington Territory.

The Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar position is named after Jack and Nancy Farley who have longstanding association with SFU, including years of service and support. Jack Farley is a past member of SFU’s Board of Governors (1984-85) and earned the Distinguished Community Leadership award in 1990. Dedicated to the teaching of history, which is understood to include studies of the past, including the recent past, the position is carried out within the departments and programs of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.