Steven Hackel Associate Professor of History Ph.D., Cornell, 1994 Fields of Interest: Early America (West); California Indians; Spanish Borderlands (951) 827-1845 steven.hackel@ucr.edu

Born and raised in California , Steven Hackel earned his B.A. at Standford University in 1984 and his Ph.D. in American History from Cornell University in 1994 with specializations in early America and the American West. From 1994 to 1996 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg , Virginia . Before coming to UCR in 2007, he was on the faculty of Oregon State University for a decade. Within the larger field of early American history, Hackel's research specializes on the Spanish Borderlands, colonial California , and California Indians. His first book, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California , 1769-1850, was published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (2005). In 2006 Children of Coyote was awarded the American Society of Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize for the best book-length work in the field of ethnohistory. It also won best first book prizes given by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Western History Association, as well as the Hubert Herring Book Award sponsored by the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, and the Southern California Historical Society's Prize for the best book published on California before the Gold Rush. He initiated and serves as general editor of the Early California Population Project, a database developed by the Huntington Library that captures all ethnographic, genealogical, and demographic information recorded in the sacramental registers of California 's twenty-one Franciscan missions. The ECPP has data on more than 115,000 people – Indians, soldiers, settlers, and Franciscans –who lived in California between 1769 and 1850. He is writing a biography of Father Junípero Serra, the controversial Franciscan who oversaw the creation of California 's missions.

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