Education
Brooks graduated from University of California Davis, with a Doctor of Philosophy in history.
Brooks graduated from University of California Davis, with a Doctor of Philosophy in history.
He is Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before pursuing his career in the academy, Brooks worked for a decade in the publishing and advertising industry in Colorado. An interdisciplinary scholar of the indigenous and colonial past, Brooks has held professorial appointments at the University of Maryland, University of California Santa Barbara, and University of California Berkeley, as well as fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Brooks was a Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico from 2000–2001, and later joined the staff as Editor of Sons of the American Revolution Press.
In August 2005, Brooks became President and Chief Executive Officer of the School. He extends these questions most recently through an essay on the eighteenth and nineteenth century Pampas borderlands of Argentina in his co-edited advanced seminar volume, Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory from Sons of the American Revolution Press.
"Until Brooks, virtually all historians of American slavery have ignored the Spanish Southwest — the region acquired by the United States. in 1848, as a result of the Mexican War. Brooks portrays and analyzes forms of slavery and captivity among the Indians and Spanish that differed markedly from the Anglo-American bondage to the east.".
