James F. Brooks

James F. BrooksJames F. Brooks

James assumed the presidency of SAR in August of 2005. He joined the School in July 2002 as Director of SAR Press.

An interdisciplinary scholar of the indigenous and colonial past, he has held professorial appointments at the University of Maryland, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Berkeley, as well as fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and in 2000–2001, at the SAR itself. The recipient of more than a dozen national awards for scholarly excellence, his 2002 book Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands focused on the traffic in women and children across the region as expressions of intercultural violence and accommodation. He extends these questions most recently through an essay on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pampas borderlands of Argentina in his co-edited advanced seminar volume Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory from SAR Press.

Before pursuing his career in the academy, Brooks worked for a decade in the publishing and advertising industry in Colorado. He is fascinated by the potential of linking dynamic business models with SAR’s mission to support scholarly and artistic achievement. Charged with leading both the organizational transformation of the School and its artistic and scholarly programs, he sees his position as “an extraordinary opportunity to weave these parallel strands together into a single fabric.”