The Center for the Southwest at The University of New Mexico announces the 2023 C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture in Western History and Culture, which takes place Monday, March 20, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. in UNM Student Union Building, Ballroom C. 

Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky, Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will present the lecture titled, "The Many Faces of Habeas: Challenging Coercion and Confinement in the American West."

A reception follows from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the SUB Navajo Lounge. This event is free and open to the public. 

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 U.S. 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 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. 

About the speaker
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.

Jagodinsky 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 them at cntrsw@unm.edu. Follow the Center on Facebook at "Center for the Southwest" and Twitter @cntrsw.