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Faculty and Staff Spotlights

Headshot of Keith Ashley

Dr. Keith Ashley

Keith Ashley (Ph.D. University of Florida, 2003) is an archaeologist and associate professor of anthropology. His current research focuses on the Indigenous peoples and histories of southeastern North America, particularly Florida. Presently, he is exploring the involvement of St. Johns River fisher-hunter-gatherers in the broader world of Indigenous farmers during the 10th through the 13th centuries CE. His research also delves into the 16th and 17th century social landscape of the Indigenous Timucua-speaking Mocama. He is actively involved in archaeological excavations with UNF students throughout northeastern Florida.

Headshot of Denise Bossy

Dr. Denise Bossy

Dr. Denise Bossy is associate professor of history at the University of North Florida and North American editor-in-chief of the Ethnohistory journal. She received her BA from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from Yale University. Her teaching and research focus on Florida, local Indigenous history, public and digital humanities, and the Native South. Her award-winning publications include The Yamasee Indians: From Florida to South Carolina (University of Nebraska Press 2018). Her forthcoming book Yamasee: Indigenous Mobility and Power in the Early South, is under contract with the Omohundro Institute at the University of North Carolina Press. She is currently working with Dr. Keith Ashley on a public-facing book and digital humanities site that examines the deep history of the Mocamas, Guales, and Yamasees of Northeast Florida. This work is being funded by a 3-year National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research grant. For more see https://indigenousflorida.domains.unf.edu/.

Headshot of Laura Heffernan

Dr. Laura Heffernan

Laura Heffernan is a professor of English and one of the founding directors of the Digital Humanities Institute at UNF. Her research focuses on literary and archival histories of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is co-author, with Rachel Sagner Buurma, of  The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2021), an award-winning disciplinary history of English that draws on archival evidence of teaching practice gathered from dozens of university and college archives in the US and the UK. At UNF, Dr. Heffernan has helped to elevate the study of local history by establishing curriculum and training for UNF students to learn archival processing and complete internships with local historical societies and museums. In 2021, along with UNF colleagues Dr. Tru Leverette-Hall and Dr. Clayton McCarl, Dr. Heffernan secured funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities to complete the Viola Muse Digital Edition. She is currently at work on a book about Muse and the other men and women who formed the Negro Writers Unit of the Florida Federal Writers project (1936-40) here in Jacksonville.