Humanities Division
PhD Candidate
Graduate
Remote work location
via Zoom
Mondays, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
History Department
Education
M.A., History, UC Santa Cruz
M.A., Art History, UC Davis
B.A., Art History, University of Washington
Instructor of Record
Colonial Mexico, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2026
Latin America: Colonial Period, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2026
Depicting Difference in Colonial Latin America, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2024, 2025
Environmental History of the Early Modern Atlantic World, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz, 2022
Art in the Age of Revolution, Department of Art History, UC Davis, 2018
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
“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
Latin (Renaissance)
Nahuatl (Classical)
Spanish
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
Colonial Latin America
Early modern world history
Environmental history
History of science
Visual and material culture
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
""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
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. Review of Poisoned Relations: Healing, Power, and Contested Knowledge in the Atlantic World by Chelsea Berry. Canadian Journal of Health History (forthcoming, 2026).
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.