DAVID J. WEBER specializes in the American Southwest and Mexico. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico in Latin American History and has taught at San Diego State University (1967-76) and SMU (1976-present), where he chaired the department of history (1979-1986) and where he holds the Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History. He has also taught at the Universidad de Costa Rica as a Fulbright Lecturer (1970) and at Harvard as a visiting professor (2002). He currently directs the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU. Two governments have given him the highest honor they bestow on foreigners: in 2002 King Juan Carlos of Spain named him to membership in the Real Orden de Isabel la Católica, the Spanish equivalent of a knighthood, and in 2005 Mexico named him to the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca (the Order of the Aztec Eagle). In 2007 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Weber is author or editor of over sixty scholarly articles
and twenty-two books,
including:
The
Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the
Far Southwest, 1540-1846
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).
Foreigners
in Their Native Land: Historical
Roots of the Mexican Americans
(University of New Mexico Press, 1973).
New
Spain's Far Northern Frontier: Essays
on Spain in the American West, 1540-1821
(University of New Mexico Press, 1979).
The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, l982).
Richard
H. Kern: Expeditionary Artist in
the Far Southwest, 1848-1853
(University of New Mexico Press & the Amon Carter Museum, 1985).
Myth
and the History of the Hispanic Southwest: Essays by David J. Weber
(University of New Mexico Press, 1988.
The
Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992).
Where
Cultures Meet: Frontiers in Latin American History,
ed. with Jane M. Rausch (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994).
On
the Edge of Empire: The Taos Hacienda of Los Martínez (Santa Fe: Museum of
New Mexico Press, 1996).
His books and articles have won several honors. For example, Choice selected Foreigners in Their Native Land as one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the year. The Mexican Frontier won half a dozen awards, including Ray Allen Billington prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Co-founders Award from Westerners International. Richard H. Kern received the 1985 Outstanding Art Book Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. The Spanish Frontier, named one of the notable books of 1992 by the New York Times, won several awards, among them the "Spain and America" prize from the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Bárbaros won the American Historical Association’s 2006 John Edwin Fagg Prize “for the best publication in the history of Spain, Portugal, or Latin America.” The Spanish Frontier and Bárbaros were both History Book Club Selections.
Weber has held fellowships from the Huntington Library (Times Mirror Distinguished Fellow), American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Lamar Center at Yale. He has been elected to the Texas Institute of Letters, the American Antiquarian Society, PEN, the Mexican Academy of History, and the Society of American Historians. In recognition of bringing humane values to education, he was named a Danforth Associate. He is past president of the Western History Association (1990-91) and of the Conference of U.S.-Mexico historians (1990), and currently serves on the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians and as the Vice President of the Professional Division of the American Historical Association.
Last updated April 21, 2008.