As a historian who approaches continental North America from the perspective of its borderlands, Professor Truett is interested in the crossings—social, cultural, and environmental—that have connected the North American West and Mexico to the Americas and the world at large.  Known for his work in borderlands history, he also works actively in environmental history, the history of the North American West, transnational history, Native American and Indigenous History, Mexican history, and empires and borderlands in world history.  His current work extends from continental North America into the Indigenous and trans-imperial spaces of Europe, the Indian Ocean, the China Seas, and the Pacific basin.  He has been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tampere, Finland, and has held major fellowships at the Huntington Library, John Carter Brown Library, Newberry Library, and most recently at the Institut d’Etudes Avancées in Nantes, France.

Truett is author of Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Yale 2006), and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Duke 2004).  He is currently working on two new books. The first looks at relationships between the U.S. West, U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the world through the travels and global entanglements of a British traveler—an adventurer in Borneo and the China Seas, an opium trader between Calcutta and Canton, a sailor and gold digger in the Pacific and California—who wound up a peasant villager in a largely-Indigenous village in northern Mexico.  He uses his wanderer and his shifting cohort to recapture at the humanized scale of border-crossing peoples a view of world history that extends beyond the centrist tales of nations and empires.  The second project explores the fascination with ruins and lost worlds on American borderlands between the 1780s and 1930s.  Frequently tied to the southwestern borderlands (a land of ancient cliff palaces, Spanish missions, and American ghost towns), this obsession was a hallmark of most European-American contact faces west across North America and south into Latin America.  In spaces we typically associate with frontier youth and progress, empires were haunted by deeper legacies of antiquity and loss.

Professor Truett has helped build scholarly networks at UNM around the Newberry Consortium in American Indian History (based at the Newberry Library, in Chicago) and in cross-field collaborations at UNM (in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and fine arts) and with other borderlands institutions (NMSU, ASU, Arizona), to develop a deeper understanding of social and environmental history across the region—and to connect these regional histories to broader, border-crossing histories of the U.S., Latin America, and the world at large.

Professor Truett teaches courses on the history of the U.S.-Mexico border region (from the sixteenth century to the present), North American expansion and borderlands (from Canada to Mexico; from the colonial era to the present), Indigenous histories of the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico, borderlands and empires in world history, and environmental history. He regularly works with students in both U.S. and Latin American history. He devotes his time as a scholar and teacher to helping others develop the tools, curiosity, and enthusiasm to make border crossings central to their own intellectual journeys.