Campus Directory

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit History Department

Title Lecturer

Affiliation Faculty

Primary Office Location Remote work location

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours Thursdays, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Mail Stop History Department

Biography, Education and Training

Education

• Ph.D., History, UC Santa Cruz
• M.A., History, UC Santa Cruz
• M.A., Art History, UC Davis
• B.A., Art History, University of Washington 

Instructor of Record

• HIS 11A: Latin America: Colonial Period, 2026
• HIS 39D: Environmental History of the Early Modern Atlantic World, 2022
• HIS 134A: Colonial Mexico, 2026
• HIS 139M: Depicting Difference in Colonial Latin America, 2024, 2025

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 

• “Many Voices, Many Truths: Records from the O’odham (aka “Pima”) Revolt of 1751–52," Arizona State Museum Master Class, University of Arizona, 2025
• Latin for Research, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, 2025
• Missionary Manuscripts in Mesoamerican Languages, Princeton University, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Library of Congress, 2024 
• New Approaches to Frontier History, World History Center, University of Pittsburgh, 2022
• Classical Nahuatl, The University of Utah and Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, 2019-2021

Languages

• French
• Nahuatl (Classical)
• Spanish 

Research Interests

• Catholicism in the early modern world
• Climate and weather in the 17th and 18th centuries
• Environmental change in Colonial Mexico
• Jesuit missionaries in the Spanish Empire
• Sensory history

Teaching Interests

• Colonial Latin America 
• Early modern world history
• Environmental history 
• History of science
• Visual and material culture

Awards, Honors 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 Presentations

• ""Airs, Waters, Places" in the Early Modern World: The Legacy of Hippocratic-Galenic Approaches to Environment and Climate for Jesuit Missionaries in Northern New Spain," American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 2026
• "From Drought to Deluge: Meteorological Miracles and Jesuit Missions," Sixteenth Century Society Conference, October 2025
• "Climate and Evangelization in Northwestern Colonial 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 
• "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

Selected Publications

• Milton, Piper. "Divine Weather: How Jesuit Missionaries to the Pimería Alta Interpreted Climate and Environment." Journal of Arizona History 66, no. 3 (2025): 373-388.
• Milton, Piper. Review of Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond by Sarah Finley. Sound Studies 11, no. 2 (2025): 346-348.
• 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.