Margaret Jacobs

Born 1963 San Pedro, CA (USA)

Margaret Jacobs is a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at UNL, and served as the director of Womens and Gender Studies from 2006-2011. She was the 2015-16 Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in England. Before working at UNL, she taught at Mexico State University from 1997-2004. Jacobs is the author of over a dozen articles and three books. She has lectured widely in England, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Studies. Jacobs specializes in Colonialism and Decolonization, Indigenous Peoples, Native Americans, the North American West, and Women. She has been a consultant on several films that are related to American Indian adoption and American Indian Women. Jacobs studies the history of the American West, and is interested in cross-cultural relations between women in the American West and other colonial settings. Her books include Endangered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934 (1999), White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (2009), and A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (2014).

Places Lived

Lincoln, NE: 2004-

Author Of

Fiction
Nonfiction

Keywords

History; Academic; Women; Native American History

Education

AB, 1986, Stanford University,
MA, 1992, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA
PhD, 1996, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA

Occupation

Professor of History & Director of Women's and Gender Studies, UNL

Honors

Bancroft Prize of the American Historical Association for White Mother to a Dark Race, 2009
Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, Cambridge University, 2015-2016
Robert G. Athearn Book Award for best book on 20th-Century American West for White Mother to a Dark Race, 2009
Armitage-Jameson Prize for the best book in western women’s history for White Mother to a Dark Race, 2009
Arrell Morgan Gibson Award from the Western History Association for best article of the year in American Indian History, 2005, for “Maternal Colonialism”
Gasper Perez de Villagra Award from the Historical Society of New Mexico for Endangered Encounters, 1999
Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians for Endangered Encounters, 1999
Nebraska Book Award for After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands, 2022

Bibliography

Engendered Encounters: Feminism and Pueblo Cultures, 1879-1934. 1999.
White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. 2009.
A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World. 2014.
After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands. 2021.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to NebraskaAuthors@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.