A. S. Dillingham
Alan Shane Dillingham is a historian and associate professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. During the 2024-2025 academic year, he will serve as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Dillingham’s research focuses on the history of Native and Indigenous peoples across the Americas. He has published on twentieth-century Mexico, the intersection of anti-colonial politics and development policy, and labor and youth-led social movements.
His first book, Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2021) won two awards; the American Society for Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award and the Conference on Latin American History's María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History.
Dillingham serves on the editorial boards of the Radical History Review and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. He also serves on the international collective of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Maryland. His writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NACLA Report, Animal Político, and Jacobin.
He is currently working on a second book project that uses family history to explore the intersection of Native dispossession and chattel slavery in the Americas. Tracing the experience of his ancestors, removed from Mississippi to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears, Dillingham will examine how slavery fueled the process of Native dispossession while also interrogating how Native Americans participated in systems of oppression.
The questions which drive Dillingham’s research agenda began at a young age. Growing up in a white family with a Choctaw grandfather, indigeneity was something that felt both close and at the same time distant. The white side of the family made casual jokes about Indians while his grandfather shared stories of Indian Country. In high school, Dillingham found himself in Mexico, studying Spanish in the aftermath of an Indigenous uprising led by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. These experiences led him to study history as a way of making sense of himself and the broader world. An enrolled tribal member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Dillingham seeks to connect the history and politics of Native peoples across the Americas in his teaching and scholarship.
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