Biography
Katrina Jagodinsky is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History. She is a legal historian examining marginalized peoples’ engagement with nineteenth-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions throughout the North American West. Jagodinsky holds a Ph.D. in History (2011) and M.A. in American Indian Studies (2004) from the University of Arizona, and she earned her B.A. (2002) from Lawrence University. She spent a postdoctoral year at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies before joining the department and was the inaugural Jack & Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University in 2019.
Jagodinsky’s first book Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 explains the strategies of six women seeking to protect their bodies, lands, and progeny from the whims of settler-colonists in the tumultuous process of westward expansion and conquest. It is the first book in the prestigious Lamar Series in Western History from Yale University Press to make women its primary focus and it received an Honorable Mention for the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. The study expands the chronology of Indigenous women’s critique of colonial and exploitative legal regimes, illustrating both the longevity of laws making Indian women economically and sexually vulnerable, and the persistence of Native women’s innovative arguments against such oppressive legal systems.
Jagodinsky has also published a number of articles and essays that examine the efforts of Indigenous and mixed-race women and children to leverage the American legal system in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. “A Testament to Power: Mary Woolsey and Dolores Rodriguez as Trial Witnesses in Arizona’s Early Statehood,” won the 2012-2013 Jerome I. Braun Prize for Best Article in Western Legal History, and “A Tale of Two Sisters: Family Histories from the Strait Salish Borderlands,” won the 2017 Jensen-Miller Prize for Best Article in Western Women’s & Gender History from the Western History Association.
In 2016, Jagodinsky organized a symposium and anthology project in collaboration with the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University and the UNL History Department that she co-edited with Pablo Mitchell of Oberlin College. Beyond the Borders of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West centers its discussion on two deceptively simple questions: How have legal borderlands defined the North American West, and how have Westerners defined and/or challenged legal borderlands? Jagodinsky and other contributors’ answers to these questions characterize the West as a place of many overlapping legal borderlands rather than a lawless place. The collection from Kansas University Press and illustrates the importance and influence of the law, in its myriad and complex forms, on American experience, history, and identity.
Jagodinsky is an active member of the profession, serving on committees for the American History Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Coalition for Western Women’s History, and the Western History Association.
Her current focus is on her research project Petitioning For Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, which is a collaboration with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities that is funded by the National Science Foundation. She is accepting graduate students interested in critical legal histories of the long nineteenth century.
