ASM Ethnohistorian Michael Brescia Named Fulbright Scholar
Will Study History of North American Water Rights Laws
Dr. Michael Brescia
photo by Jannelle Weakly
September 2011
UA Professor Receives Fulbright
for Research in Canada
By University Communications
September 21, 2011
This article is excerpted with permission from UANews.
View the full article
Michael M. Brescia, associate curator of ethnohistory with the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, has been granted the Fulbright-Carlos Rico Award for North American Studies at the University of Western Ontario.
Starting this month, Brescia will spend a year researching for a project, "Water Rights and Competing Legal Traditions in North America; Historical Perspectives."
As the Fulbright-Carlos Rico Visiting Research Chair for North American Studies at Western, Brescia will teach courses on the comparative history of North America. He also will conduct research for his project, which examines the historic tensions between common law and civil law in the adjudication of property rights, particularly water rights, in Canada and the U.S.
"It is with a great deal of pleasure that I welcome Michael Brescia to the distinguished group of Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholars," said Michael Hawes, executive director of Fulbright Canada. "Dr. Brescia's project is important and timely and his research will offer unique and critical insights that will have implications for the study of North America's legal traditions that will stretch across our shared border, and beyond."
Brescia has a master's and doctoral degrees in Latin American history from the UA and a bachelor's degree in history from West Virginia University.
Brescia is widely published in English and Spanish in academic and peer-reviewed journals, and he has co-authored several books on North American relations. When he returns to the U.S., Brescia expects to use the Fulbright research for a book project that will identify and evaluate property rights under the Spanish and Mexican civil laws of property during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Traversing the Continent in Fulbright Style, Part I: Canada on the ASM blog
Traversing the Continent in Fulbright Style, Part II: Mexico
More about Dr. Brescia's research on water rights
