Ryan Hall is an historian of Native North America and the U.S. and Canadian West. His current research focuses on the history of the Blackfoot (Niitsitapi) people of the Montana-Alberta borderlands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is especially interested in understanding how Indigenous people like the Blackfoot responded to profound disruptions like the arrival of horses, epidemic diseases, and the fur trade. More broadly, he is interested in seeing early North American history beyond the framework of national borders and in understanding Indigenous history through transnational perspectives. During the 2018-19 academic year, he is teaching courses on Historiography and Methodologies, American Indian History, Native-White Relations to 1865, and Global Indigenous History.
Prior to coming to NAU, Dr. Hall received his Ph.D. from Yale University and his B.A. from the University of Oklahoma. From 2015 to 2017 he was the inaugural University College Fellow in Early American History at the University of Toronto, and during the fall 2017 semester he was a Fulbright Canada Research Chair at the University of Calgary. He has previously received fellowships and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Council for Canadian Studies, and the Newberry Library’s Consortium in American Indian Studies, among others.
Publications
“Negotiating Sovereignty: U.S. and Canadian Colonialisms on the Northwest Plains, 1855-1877,” in Remaking North American Sovereignty: Towards a Continental History of State Transformation in the 1860s, eds. Frank Towers and Jewel Spangler (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2019).
“Before the Medicine Line: Blackfoot Trade Strategy and the Emergence of the Northwest Plains Borderlands, 1818-1846,” The Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 3 (August 2017): 381-406.
“The Divergent Wests of Isaac Stevens and Lame Bull: Finding Motive in the 1855 Blackfoot Treaty,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly 105, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 107-121.
“Struggle and Survival in Sallisaw: Revisiting John Steinbeck’s Oklahoma,” Agricultural History 86, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 33-56. Winner of the 2013 Vernon Carstensen Memorial Award for best article of the year in Agricultural History.