Rate My Professor Alice Nash

Alice Nash is an Associate Professor of History and the Graduate Program Director in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 1997 and a Master’s degree in American and New England Studies from Boston University in 1989. Nash’s research interests encompass the effects of colonization on family and gender dynamics in pre-1800 Wabanaki history, northeastern Native American history, Early American history, Indigenous studies, and modern topics including the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. She has published extensively on northeastern Native American history, with several articles appearing in French translation in the journal Recherches amérindiennes au Québec. Key works include co-authoring Daily Life of Native Americans from Post-Columbian through Nineteenth Century America with Christoph Strobel (Greenwood Press, 2006) and serving as co-editor of The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas (Routledge, 2019), which includes her chapter “Indigenous Peoples of the Americas to 1900.” Her ongoing book project, An Ethnic Shapeshifter in New York, explores the life of a multiracial African American man who reshaped his identity twice in post-World War II New York City as a fashion designer, dancer, and performer.

Nash received the inaugural Fulbright-Université de Montréal Distinguished Chair in 2003–2004, during which she contributed to the editorial board of Recherches amérindiennes au Québec and developed a course on the 1704 Deerfield Raid. She has been awarded four National Endowment for the Humanities grants (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019) for directing or co-directing Teaching Native American Histories Summer Institutes aimed at K–12 teachers in collaboration with the Five College Schools Partnership. Currently, she chairs the Advisory Board for the Mellon Democracy and Landscape Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, represents UMass on the State Commission for Plymouth 400 as co-chair of its Education Committee, and participates in the Five College Native American & Indigenous Studies committee. Her courses include Indigenous Peoples of North America, Indigenous Histories for STEM, Indigenous Women, Plymouth 1620, and U.S. History to 1865.