Nancy Parezo

Nancy Parezo began working at the University of Arizona in 1982. She officially joined the American Indian Studies faculty in 1998 as a tenured Professor with a shared appointment in the Arizona State Museum (ASM). She was an affiliated professor in Anthropology and a Research Associate for the Field Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution. She was well served as Director of Undergraduate Studies.  In recent years she was awarded the Lifetime Acheivement Award from the Council for Museum Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, the University of Arizona's Outstanding Mentor Award by the Graduate College,and given distinguished lectures at several universities. 

Professor Parezo served extensively on AIS and university committees. A specialist in the American Southwest who focused on the history of science and the interactions among Euroamericans and Native groups, she worked extensively to help native communities in the area of cultural preservation. An award winning researcher and mentor, having over 250 publications including Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest and Northern Mexico (UA Press), Preserving the Anthropological Record (Wenner-Gren Foundation), as well articles in Anthropologie et Sociétés, Current Anthropology, Selling the Indian: Commercializing and Appropriating American Indian Cultures, and Blackwell Companion to Native American History, A Companion to American Indian History. Her exhibits have been shown at the Denver Art Museum, the Missouri Historical Society, and in Paris, France. Professor Parezo's had two books in press with the University of Nebraska, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and On Their Own Frontier: Women Historians and the Re-visioning of the American West, 1900 to 1906. She taught courses in Contemporary Indian American, cultural preservation and museum, writing tribal histories, grantwriting, and a methodology course for AIS graduate students, and a PhD level theory course and Dine History and Philosophy. Professor Parezo had an extensive record of service/outreach, including a year as loaned executive to the Arizona Board of Regents and memberships on over a dozen major university committees since 1990. She served on the University of Arizona's Institutional review Board in Medicine.