Barbara Ganson received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994.  Her first book, The Guarani Under Spanish Rule in the Rio de la Plata (Stanford University Press, 2003) won two book prizes:  a Choice Award for Outstanding Academic American and Caribbean History published during the previous two years.  She is an Area Editor for the journal, The Americas.  She has served as president of two historical organizations:  the Southwestern Historical Association and the Latin American and Caribbean History Section of the Southern Historical Association.  She was named Chair of the James Scobie Prize Committee for the Conference on Latin American History in 2013.

Her current research and writing efforts will be directed toward understanding Guarani native texts during the late colonial period.  She is also revising a manuscript on women aviators during the interwar period.  Her latest manuscript, Texas Takes Wing:  A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State has been accepted for publication by the University of Texas Press.  It will appear in print in the fall 2013.

She is currently working on a Digital Archive Project:  "Guarani Voices from the Colonial Past," in conjunction with Professor Capucine Boidein, IHEAL Sorbonne, Paris.  This year she has been invited to participate at the First Symposium on Jesuit Global Mission, Intercultural Encounter, and Interreligious Dialogue, Berkley Center of Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University.  She has also been invited to present a paper on Gurarani religious adaptation at the forthcoming conference on Religion in the Iberian Colonial World 1500-1700, through the auspices of the Kate Hamburger Kolleg for the Dynamics in the History of religions, a research center dedicated to the study of the history of religious interactions and exchanges, at the University of the Ruhr in Bochum, Germany.

Professor Ganson is an aviator and a historian.  She is Chair of the Gulf Stream Chapter of the Ninety-Nines, international women pilots' organization.  She is the Florida organizer for Women of Aviation Worldwide Week, March 4-10, 2013.  She has developed partnerships with various organizations, including NASA Kennedy Space Center, to celebrate at Titusville on March 8 and 9, 2013, the 50th anniversary since the first woman astronaut went into space.

 

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Courses

Undergraduate Courses

• Colonial Latin American History
• Independence of Latin America
• Modern Latin American History
• The Birth of Aviation and Its Impact on the Twentieth Century
• Senior Seminar
• Explorations in Ethnohistory
• Historical Methodology

Graduate Courses

• Explorations in Ethnohistory: The Indian in the Americas.
• Comparative Frontiers and Spanish Borderlands

Curriculum Vitae (Available upon request)