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 2026-2027 academic year, he will be a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Dillingham’s research focuses on the history of Indigenous peoples of 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. 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.
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.
He is working on a second book project that uses family history to explore the intersection of Indigenous dispossession and racial slavery. Tracing the experience of his ancestors, removed from Mississippi to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears, Dillingham examines how slavery fueled the process of Indigenous dispossession while also interrogating Indigenous participation in these systems of oppression.
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, the London Review of Books blog, NACLA Report, Animal Político, and Jacobin.
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