Nancy O. Gallman, assistant professor of history, has been awarded an Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Award. This prestigious award, administered biennially by Pomona College and the American Council of Learned Societies, is given to early-career professors who demonstrate excellence of teaching in the humanities. The award comes with nearly $13,000 in funding that will support Gallman in completing her first book manuscript, Law’s Borderlands: Life, Liberty, and Property in an Old American South.
Law’s Borderlands will closely examine the intricate interactions of diverse peoples—Indigenous peoples, Spaniards, African Americans, and Anglo Americans—living in the Florida borderlands at the turn of the 19th century. Gallman’s research uniquely highlights how each of these groups contributed to a “cosmopolitan legal order.”
Gallman holds both a PhD in history and a JD. She traces her interest in the history of law and legal pluralism, particularly in the context of early American constitutionalism, to her second year at New York University School of Law. “I’m originally from a small town in South Carolina, and I wanted to better understand how Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and people of African descent in the American South mutually constructed law and legal ideas in the years following the American Revolution,” says Gallman. “Later, as a history graduate student, I made that question the subject of my dissertation, the scope of which I am now expanding into this book.”
Gallman brings her research into the classroom. “My research is a resource that I use in all of my courses to share with students my enthusiasm for research and writing, my work process—especially the challenges of research and writing and how to handle them—and my understanding of the shared histories of Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and people of African descent in early North America and the complex history of American law,” she says.
Within the history department, Gallman has created a new curriculum in early American history that highlights how human experiences have changed over time—shaped by social change, economic development, migration, the natural world, politics, and law—and links the significance of these experiences to present-day people and events. Gallman’s students do original archival research, develop new skills in paleography (deciphering historical manuscripts), and practice analytical writing.
Explains Gallman, “The framework for this curriculum reflects a central component of my research and my teaching philosophy: a transnational and transcultural study of North America centered on the multiple perspectives and geographies that complicate more familiar interpretations of U.S. history, while honoring the full complexity of U.S. history as part of a much larger story of human interaction across the continent.”
Gallman’s award continues a string of Graves Award successes by Lewis & Clark faculty. Over the last 20 years, awardees have included Assistant Professor of Russian Maria Hristova (2021), Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Magali Rabasa (2020), Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies Bryan Sebok (2018), Associate Professor of English Kristin Fujie (2014), Associate Professor of English Rachel Cole (2012), Associate Professor of Philosophy Joel Martinez (2010), Professor of English Karen Gross (2008), and Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Associate Professor of History David Campion (2006).
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