cothran


Boyd Cothran

Photo of Boyd Cothran

Department of History

Professor

Office: 2132 Vari Hall
Phone: 416 736-2100 Ext: 66959
Email: cothran@yorku.ca

Attached CV

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Boyd Cothran is Professor of U.S. and Global History in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

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Born and raised in Ventura County, California, Boyd Cothran is a second-generation Okinawan-American and the first in his family to attend university. He now lives in Toronto, Canada, where he is Professor of History in the Department of History at York University. He is a former editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2017-2022) and the author of Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), which received the 2015 Robert M. Utley Prize for the best book in military history from the Western History Association, and The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850-1914 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). He has also written for the New York Times, Indian Country Today, Aeon, and other venues, both public and academic. He has also co-edited two volumes of global history, Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Bridging Cultural Concepts of Nature: Indigenous People and Protect Spaces of Nature (University of Helsinki Press, 2021). For the last year and a half, he has lived in Hamburg, Germany where he has been working on a project exploring that maritime city’s thousand-year history of engagement with the rest of the world.

Degrees

PhD, University of Minnesota
MA, University of Minnesota
BA, University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests

History , Globalization, Global History, American West, Indigenous History, Historical Memory, Political Economy, Settler Colonialism, and American Innocence