Kris Klein Hernández

Kris Klein Hernández serves as Assistant Professor of History at Connecticut College since 2022, specializing in U.S. borderlands history with emphasis on race, gender, and sexuality. His scholarship bridges comparative ethnic studies and 19th-century militarization within North American contexts.

His educational background includes:

• A.B. in Latin American Studies cum laude and Spanish from Bowdoin College
• M.A. in History from University of Texas, El Paso
• Ph.D. in American Culture from University of Michigan

Dr. Hernández investigates how military forts functioned as sites of settler colonialism along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, examining processes of comparative racialization through architecture, labor, and spatial transformation. His research demonstrates how federal infrastructures reshaped cultural and material relations between army personnel, Mexicans, freed African Americans, and Indigenous communities (Diné/Apache/Tigua) across Texas and New Mexico Territory. Current teaching covers borderlands history, settler colonialisms, American sexualities, and U.S. Latinx history.

His scholarly contributions have earned recognition through major fellowships:

• Ford Foundation Fellowship
• Charles Warren Center Fellowship (Harvard)
• Race, Indigeneity & Transnational Migration Fellowship (Yale)
• Institute for Citizens & Scholars Fellowship
• Social Science Research Council Fellowship
• Organization of American Historians Fellowship

Prior to Connecticut College, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Bowdoin. His book The Color of the Army: Forts and Race-Making in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.-Mexico Borderlands analyzes how military garrisons transformed from adobe structures on Indigenous lands to concrete fortifications, arguing that 19th-century militarization constituted a settler colonial project that reconfigured racial hierarchies through spatial control.