Christopher Valesey

Christopher Valesey serves as an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Ball State University within the Department of History under the College of Sciences and Humanities. He joined the department in fall 2025 to teach online sections of History 150, "The West in the World".

Dr. Valesey specializes in early modern global history with research focused on sixteenth-century Mexico, Nahuatl language (the language of the Aztec empire), human-animal studies, and cultural change. His doctoral work challenged conventional narratives about Old World animals' role in Spanish colonialism, arguing against their characterization as primarily destructive agents. His research bridges colonial Latin American studies with interdisciplinary approaches to cultural transformation.

He earned his PhD in Colonial Latin American History from Penn State University in 2019, where he served as an editorial assistant for the Hispanic American Historical Review and worked as a paleographer and translator for PBS's Finding Your Roots. His forthcoming article "Perseverance of the Eagle-Jaguar Military Ethos in Sixteenth-Century New Spain" is scheduled for publication in The Sixteenth Century Journal.