Kelly Lee Jenks
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
PhD Student
University of Arizona
Kelly Lee Jenks received a Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar award in Fall 2008 to support research on Constructing Colonial Identity: Interaction, Adaptation, and Spatial Organization in Late Colonial New Mexico. At the time, she was a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona.
Jenks specializes in the history and late prehistory of the American Southwest and Southern Plains. Her research focuses on the material construction of social and political identities and the influence of interregional trade in New Mexico, with a major focus on the construction of “Hispanic” identity within multiethnic colonial communities.Title of Research : Constructing Colonial Identity: Interaction, Adaptation, and Spatial Organization in Late Colonial New Mexico
While at UNM, Jenks' research focused on the intersections of place, identity, and economy in eighteenth-century New Mexico. She examined the archives at the Center for Southwest Research in search of materials addressing the nature, role, and impact of trade between Hispano communities living on New Mexico's eastern and northern frontiers and their nomadic indigenous neighbors. She then intended to compare the information on frontier economic practices gathered from these historical sources with the existing archaeological data from eighteenth-century sites in northern and eastern New Mexico.
