The 2025 Arizona Author Series Explores the Culture and History of Arizona

January 23rd - Dr. Sunaura Taylor will speak about her book Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert.

About Disabled Ecologies: Once a landscape becomes polluted, the expectation is to force the polluting entity to pay for the destruction they unleashed. Yet, the land, waterways, wildlife, and people are forever altered for generations. Taylor takes readers to a Superfund site in Tucson to learn about the long-term implications of living in such a contaminated place. This new altered and fractured landscape becomes a disabled ecology that requires reframing how nature and people survive and, hopefully, thrive.

February 20th – Dr. Alan J. M. Noonan will speak about his book, Mining Irish-American Lives: Western Communities from 1849 to 1920.

About Mining Irish-American Lives: Mining history is a cornerstone of the American West, especially Arizona; however, the personal experiences of miners and their families remains elusive. Noonan’s research uses often-missed resources to piece together a tapestry about the Irish and Irish-American women and men who worked and lived in these towns during a pivotal era.

March 13th - Dr. Laura K. Muñoz will speak about her book, Desert Dreams: Mexican Arizona and the Politics of Educational Equality.

About Desert Dreams: Muñoz’s book is the first comprehensive social history of Arizonenses, or Arizona Mexicans, that focuses on their legal and political struggles before 1960. As Arizona became a Territory and later a state, Arizonenses expected to be treated as citizens. Instead, they discovered they needed to fight for political quality, particularly access to an education. Through their collective organizing and legal battles, they filed the first desegregation case in the state (Romo v. Laird (1925)) and inspired a broader call-to-action for civil rights.

April 17th – Dr. Brian D. Haley will speak about his book, Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field.

About Hopis and the Counterculture: During the 1960s, countercultural movements adopted ideas of spirituality attributed to the Hopi religion that spread far and wide. How did an Indigenous group’s belief system become so popular? It all started in the 1930s and 1940s when a group of Hopi people split from the tribe and introduced a version of Hopi religion to non-Indigenous people. Yet, the result was a profound misinterpreting and misunderstanding Hopi religion and culture, that promote primitivism, stereotyping, and neo-Indianism.

May 22nd - Dr. Nicholas Villanueva, Jr. will speak about her book, Rainbow Cattle Co.: Liberation, Inclusion, and the History of Gay Rodeo.

About Rainbow Cattle Co.: At first glace, the rodeo may not seem like a critical space for gay liberation; yet, Villanueva argues just the opposite. While the gal liberation movement is associated with urban areas, the rodeo has long been overlooked as an essential site for expression, particularly when it comes to questioning assumptions about gender, heterosexuality, and Western culture. The rodeo became a space for insisting on full participation in sports and a platform to fight against the AIDS epidemic.