David Kerry

David Kerry is a Ph.D. candidate working on histories of 20th century Native America, Latin America, and British colonial administration. His dissertation, "The Global Indian New Deal, 1923 - 1953" argues that the “Indian New Deal,” a series of transformative alterations to U.S. federal Indian policy in the 1930s and 40s, was not the sole product of domestic political forces but instead had its genesis in Mexican, Spanish, and British Indigenous policies. It seeks to directly incorporate Native American history into a hemispheric perspective, arguing that Spanish colonial and later Mexican Indigenous policies were central to the administration of Indigenous peoples in the United States. At the same time, it traces connections between colonial administrators in the Americas and British empire, demonstrating how these networks shaped Indigenous policies in the Western Hemisphere.

David has served as a coordinator for the Global and International History Workshop and was a Graduate Fellow for the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.