Michael M. Brescia, associate curator of ethnohistory with the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, has been granted the Fulbright-Carlos Rico Award for North American Studies at The University of Western Ontario. Brescia will spend one year, starting in September, researching for a project entitled, Water Rights and Competing Legal Traditions in North America; Historical Perspectives.
As the Fulbright-Carlos Rico Visiting Research Chair for North American Studies at Western, Brescia will teach courses on the comparative history of North America. He will also conduct research for his project which examines the historical tensions between common and civil law in the adjudication of property rights, particularly water rights, in Canada and the United States.
“It is with a great deal of pleasure that I welcome Dr. Michael Brescia to the distinguished group of Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholars,” says Dr. Michael Hawes, Fulbright Canada executive director. “Dr. Brescia’s project is important and timely and his research will offer unique and critical insights that will have implications for the study of North America’s legal traditions that will stretch across our shared border, and beyond.”
Brescia holds a master’s degree and PhD in Latin American history from the University of Arizona, and a bachelor’s degree in history from West Virginia University. Brescia is widely published in English and Spanish in academic and peer-reviewed journals, and he has co-authored several books on North American relations. Upon returning to the United States, he hopes to use the research from his Fulbright for a book project that will identify and evaluate property rights under the Spanish and Mexican civil laws of property during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.