We are excited to have Dr. James F. Brooks as the distinguished lecturer and keynote for the 2021 Rawley Symposium. His scholarship examines moments of humanitarian crisis in the borderlands of what is now Mexico and the United States. He has held leadership positions in several organizations, including most recently the National Council on Public History, that advocate the role of historians and humanities scholars and creatives in assessing national and local pasts and presents. Dr. Brooks is a renowned historian of the US-Mexico borderlands who focuses on Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American identities and relationships to tell the story of marginalized people who use relationships and stories to survive colonial-era and ongoing oppression. His scholarship has earned a Bancroft Prize and he has actively facilitated critical community dialogues about the ethics and values invested in public memory and public history, particularly regarding contested narratives and identities. Dr. Brooks is also a renowned mentor who has invested time and resources toward both the diversification of the academy and career diversity for those trained in the academy. His talk explores the potential for mutually-enriching exchanges between academic researchers, local historic site interpreters, and our broader publics. Brooks illustrates how a single conversation with a docent in La Veta, Colorado, came to inspire research and an array of public history engagements, from San Bernardino, California, to the Cherokee town of Quanassee and an abandoned cotton plantation in Dawson County, Georgia.

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