Dr.
Frederick E. Hoxie
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Historian; Editor; Educator; Library administrator
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
History
Elected
2013
Swanlund Professor of History and Law. A leading figure in the development of American Indian studies over the last half-century. Hoxie contributed to this field as teacher, scholar, and administrator, for eleven years directing the Newberry Library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History, the virtual Mecca for aspiring and veteran Indian historians. He served an additional four years as the library's Vice President for Research and Education, overseeing research centers devoted to the history of cartography, American social history and Renaissance studies (as well as American Indian history) and a center for public programs. At the Newberry he was successful in obtaining funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and several private foundations that made possible support for a vibrant intellectual community of scholars. He followed a similar path following his move to the University of Illinois, helping to found the institution's American Indian Studies program and Native American House, a cultural center on campus. He was also instrumental in founding a multi-university consortium to support graduate education in Native American studies. His leadership has fostered the sophistication of American Indian studies as it is known today. Hoxie is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including The Encyclopedia of North American Indians (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) and This Indian Country (Penguin, 2012). The contributions of his books and scholarly articles, including Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History, which he has co-edited for more than two decades, established his lasting reputation in the field. Hoxie is also an effective public historian who has offered his scholarship and administrative acumen to American Indian communities, sitting on advisory boards for films, exhibits and other public projects and serving as a consultant to government agencies and an expert witness on behalf of tribes engaged in defenses of their treaty rights. He was a founding trustee of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian and has also been elected as a trustee of Amherst College.
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