Nancy Parezo

Nancy Parezo has been teaching at the University of Arizona since 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 is also an affiliated professor in Anthropology and a Research Associate for the Field Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution. She is currently serving as Director of Undergraduate Studies.  In recent years she has been 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. She currently serves as a speaker for Arizona Humanities.

Professor Parezo has been with the UA since 1980 and has served extensively on AIS and university committees. A specialist in the American Southwest who focuses on the history of science and the interactions among Euroamericans and Native groups, she has worked extensively to help native communities in the area of cultural preservation. An award winning researcher and mentorShe has 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 as recent 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 most current 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 teaches courses in Contemporary Indian American, cultural preservation and museum, writing tribal histories, grantwriting, and AIS 548, a methodology course for AIS graduate students. Fall 2005 she will;teach AIS 602, the PhD level theory course and AIS 336, Dine History and Philosophy. Professor Parezo has 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 has served on the University of Arizona's Institutional review Board in Medicine.