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 the 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 several projects. The first is a book-length study of the relationships between the US-Mexico borderlands and the wider nineteenth-century world. It takes as a point of departure the travels and entanglements of an orphan who drifted from London to Borneo as an adventurer’s apprentice before then becoming a navigator-in-training in the East Indian Archipelago, an opium trader between Calcutta and Canton, an adventurer in the guano islands of South America and the gold fields of California, and – at his journey’s end – a villager in a largely-Indigenous peasant village in northern Mexico. Truett uses the tangled tales of his drifter and his ever-shifting cohort to recapture at the humanized scale of border-crossing peoples a view of the world that extends beyond the centrist tales of nations and empires.

Truett is also working with colleagues at the University of Washington, Princeton University, the University of Helsinki, and York University on two book-length projects. The first, which resulted from a symposium hosted by the Center for the Southwest at UNM and a follow-up workshop hosted by the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at UW, focuses on Indigenous Borderlands in North America. The second, resulting from a workshop hosted by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU-in-Taos and a follow-up workshop held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, focuses on Indigenous crossings and mobilities in North American and global contexts. He has also worked with colleague Maria Lane (Department of Geography and Environmental Studies), and with funding from the National Park Service, on a multi-year project on Native trails and Indigenous infrastructures in the US West.

Professor Truett has helped build scholarly networks at UNM around the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (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.