Erik Hadley
Specializations
Education
Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo
M.A., State University of New York at Buffalo
B.A., University of Montana
Erik Hadley joined the history department at Boise State University in 2014. He teaches specialized courses on medieval Europe, the Old Regime and the French Revolution, indigenous studies in both the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds, and Native American History. He has served as either chair or committee member on more than a dozen BSU History MA student thesis projects.
Hadley grew up on a ranch in western Montana where he developed an early appreciation for traveling, history, and the outdoors. He attended the University of Montana in Missoula, MT, graduating with a BA in History and Political Science, and completed his History MA and PhD at the University at Buffalo, NY where he specialized in cultural history of Early Modern France/Belgium and Indigenous histories of the Atlantic World.
In 2001-02, he was awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship to conduct doctoral research in Belgium and France, where he lived for a year while researching in Brussels, Paris, and various provincial archives studying the evolution of national identity and state power in French-Belgian borderland communities in the 16-18th centuries. This research formed the basis for his doctoral dissertation.
An active scholar, Hadley has published on the evolution of the French-Belgian border and more recently published two articles on his new research topic: the commemorative history of civic religious processionals in Belgium and the evolution of civic rituals over the past four hundred years. In 2019-2020, Hadley received a second US Scholar Fulbright grant to study four folkloric festivals in Belgium that originated in the late Middle Ages and are still commemorated today. He is currently writing a book chapter on these commemorative festivals that will appear in the forthcoming volume of European Festival Studies, 1450-1700.
Hadley is active outside of academia and has presented his work on Belgian folkloric festivals and on Hawaiian and Native American sovereignty issues in public non-specialist forums including the Idaho Humanities Council series Connected Conversations. He also has worked with the AP European History College Board Exam since 2009 and is a member of the AP leadership team.
Erik and his wife Shasta have two boys and love to spend their time enjoying the Idaho outdoors backpacking, rock-climbing, and skiing. Hadley and his family also enjoy traveling abroad, particularly hiking and climbing in the Italian Dolomite mountains and surfing and scuba-diving throughout the Pacific world.
Contact
Office: L189
Phone: (208) 426-4879
erikhadley@boisestate.edu
Spring 2024 Office Hours: Zoom by appointment