Profiles of 2025-2026 NMHR Fellows

Richard Maska is a PhD student at the University of New Mexico. He is slated to defend his dissertation project, “Building Nakota and Oceti Sakowin Nationhood: Landownership, Development, and Native Sovereignty on the Northern Great Plains, 1850-1933,” in spring 2026. His research focuses on the Fort Peck Oceti Sakowin and Nakota during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically how they articulated sovereignty while navigating state-directed economic, political, and socials development initiatives. Deeply interested in community-engaged research, Maska hopes his work will elucidate the historical present-day issues related to education, land, irrigation, and resource development by examining their historical roots.

Carlyn N. Pinkins, M.A. is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History.  She received her B.A. and M.A. in history from Georgia Southern University.  Her research interests are African American history in the Southwest and Twentieth Century North American Indigenous history.  Her dissertation explores black homesteading in the territory and state of New Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. She is also a CRS Dissertation Fellow and the Dr. Charles E. Becknell, Sr. Fellow at the Center of Southwest Research and Special Collections at the University of New Mexico.

Sierra Raquel Ramirez (Mescalero Apache, European Descent) is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of New Mexico. She earned her M.A. in History from the University of Texas at San Antonio and her B.A. in History, with a secondary Social Studies teaching certification, also from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her dissertation aims to historicize myriad Indigenous childhoods as gendered experiences in off-reservation federal American Indian boarding schools in the early twentieth century in the U.S. West. Her research centers on student resistance through formations of affective peer and community relationships, caretaking, and advocacy through student-produced literary forms. She also serves as an editorial assistant for the New Mexico Historical Review (NMHR). 

Abigail Swanson is a second-year master's degree student in the History department, and an editorial assistant at the New Mexico Historical Review. Her studies focus on nineteenth and twentieth century reproduction and gender in the American Southwest. Abigail was a GA for one year in the History department. She is currently working on her master's thesis and plans to apply to be a PhD candidate. During her undergraduate studies at the University of Washington, Abigail wrote encyclopedic entries for BlackPast.org. After graduating with a BA in History from the University of Washington in 2013, Abigail took over a decade off of school and participated in community activism, community event planning, and artistic endeavors including performance art, music, and writing poetry. She also started a small vintage clothing company focused on circular fashion and sustainability. She has two wonderful chihuahuas named Ripley and Wayne.