Thomas Sheridan

Thomas E. Sheridan (born 5 September 1951) is an anthropologist of Sonora, Mexico and the history and culture of Arizona and the Southwest. He was selected a Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona, and has been affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Southwest Center since 2003. Background Sheridan's family moved to Phoenix, Arizona at the age of 3. He left the South West after high school, attended Reed College (briefly) before returning and graduated from the first incarnation of Prescott College in Arizona in the 1970s. He became interested in Northern Mexico and travelled there frequently for study, spending months in Bahía Kino in 1971. He completed a PhD on the Yaqui in 1983. He directed the Mexican Heritage Project at the Arizona Historical Society from 1982-1984, and was Curator of Ethnohistory and then Director of the Office of Ethnohistorical Research at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson from 1984 to 2003. He lives on a ranch in the Alta Valley, west of Tucson, AZ. Scholarship Sheridan's initial scholarship was on the history and culture of the Yaqui in Sonora, north west Mexico, and native ranchers around the municipio of Cucurpe in Sonora. He combined studies of livelihoods, with the historical unfolding of Native and colonial interactions over the centuries. In the 1990s he wrote a widely read account of the history of Arizona, Arizona: a history, revised in 2012.