Graduate Student Directory

Research Interests

Climate and weather in the 17th and 18th centuries

Early modern sensory history 

Environmental change in Colonial Mexico

Jesuit missionaries in the Spanish Empire

Biography, Education and Training

Education

M.A., History, UC Santa Cruz, 2020

M.A., Art History, UC Davis, 2015

B.A., Art History, University of Washington, 2012 

Instructor of Record

HIS 139M: Depicting Difference in Colonial Latin America, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2024, 2025

HIS 39D: Environmental History of the Early Modern Atlantic World, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2022

AHI 183A: Art in the Age of Revolution, Department of Art History, UC Davis, 2018

AHI 130: Landscape, Nature, and Art, Department of Art History, UC Davis, 2017

UC Santa Cruz Teaching Assistant Experience

HIS 2B: The World Since 1500

HIS 9: Native American History

HIS 10A: United States History to 1877

HIS 11A: Colonial Latin America

HIS 15: United States History, 1776-Present

HIS 70A: European History, 1500-1815

HIS 70B: European History, 1815-Present

HIS 100: Historical Skills and Methods

HIS 134A: Colonial Mexico

HIS 151B: Drugs in World History 

Service

Graduate Representative, Academic Senate Committee on Library & Scholarly Communication, UC Santa Cruz, 2023-2025

Chair, Travel Grant Subcommittee, Graduate Student Association, UC Santa Cruz, 2024 

Representative, Graduate Committee, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2022-2024

Conference Organizing Committee, Center for World History, UC Santa Cruz, 2022-2023

Mentor, Women's Center, UC Santa Cruz, 2021-2022

Additional Training 

The Newberry Library: Discovery, Exploration, and Legacy: The Shifting Influence of Alexander von Humboldt in Latin America, 2025

Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick: Latin for Research, 2025

Princeton University, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Library of Congress: Missionary Manuscripts in Mesoamerican Languages, 2024 

World History Center, University of Pittsburgh: New Approaches to Frontier History, 2022

National Humanities Center: Meaningful Teaching and Learning in the Humanities Classroom, 2022

The University of Utah and Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas: Classical Nahuatl, 2019-2021

Languages

French

Nahuatl (Classical)

Spanish 

Honors, Awards and Grants

Research Fellowship, The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology, 2025 

National Science Foundation Travel Grant, American Society for Environmental History, 2025 

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies-Clark Research Fellowship, The Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, UCLA, 2024 

San Andreas Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 2024

Dissertation Research Summer Fellowship, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2023

Summer Public Fellowship with Tumacácori National Historic Site, The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz, 2023

Thom Gentle Research Award for Environmental History, Center for World History, UC Santa Cruz, 2022

Graduate Student Summer Residency Fellowship, National Humanities Center, 2022

Pre-Dissertation Summer Fellowship, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2021

Tinker Foundation Field Research Grant, Research Center for the Americas, UC Santa Cruz, 2020

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Nahuatl), Center for Latin American Studies, University of Utah and the U.S. Department of Education, 2019

Summer Research Fellowship, The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz, 2019

Regents Fellowship, UC Santa Cruz, 2018-2019

Selected Publications

Milton, Piper. "Kino Country: Mission Frontiers, Public Memory, and the Politics of Commemoration in Southern Arizona." in Imagining Explorers: From National Narratives to Public History, Explorers and Exploration in the Public Realm, edited by Lauren Beck and Lydia Towns (forthcoming, 2026)

Milton, Piper. "Divine Weather: Jesuit Missionaries and the Environment and Climate of the Pimería Alta and Northwestern Colonial Mexico." Journal of Arizona History (forthcoming, 2025)

Milton, Piper. Review of Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond by Sarah Finley. Sound Studies 11 (2025): 1-3.

Milton, Piper. Review of Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science by Neil Tarrant. Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 55 (2024): 300-302.                                                                                                                      

Selected Presentations

""Airs, Waters, Places" in the Early Modern World: The Legacy of Hippocratic-Galenic Approaches to Environment and Climate for Jesuit Missionaries in Northwestern Colonial Mexico," American Catholic History Association and American Historical Association Joint Annual Meeting, January 2026

"From Drought to Deluge: Meteorological Miracles and Jesuit Missions in Northern Colonial Mexico," Sixteenth Century Society Conference, October 2025

"Climate and Evangelization in Colonial Northwestern Mexico," American Society for Environmental History Conference, April 2025

"From the 100th Meridian to 400 Parts Per Million: Climate History and Climate Change in the North American West Roundtable," Western History Association Annual Conference, October 2024 

"Climate, Evangelization, and the Senses in Colonial Sonora," Multidisciplinary Conference in Premodern Studies, The Newberry Library, February 2024

"Space, Climate, and Natural Knowledge in the Jesuit Missions of Sonora," USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute: New and Emerging Studies of the Spanish Colonial Borderlands, March 2023

Teaching Interests

Colonial Latin America 

Early modern world history

History of Christianity

History of science