FCHSM Board of Advisors
Catherine Cagnany, PhD
Karen Marrero
Karen Marrero is Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University. Her work explores interactions between seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth-century Indigenous peoples and French settlers in the Great Lakes. Her book Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century was jointly published in 2020 by Michigan State University Press and University of Manitoba Press and her recent co-edited book (with Andrew Sturtevant) A Place in Common: Rethinking the History of Early Detroit was published in 2025 by Michigan State University Press.
Michael McCafferty
Michael McCafferty is a linguist specializing in the Algonquian language known as Miami-Illinois and in North American French dialectology, although he knows other languages and has taught beginning and advanced Nahuatl at Indiana University, where he currently teaches English. He has published one book, Native American Place-Names of Indiana and numerous articles. He also discovered in the Jesuit archives in Quebec a long-lost French/Miami Illinois dictionary and then by handwriting analysis identified the maker of the dictionary, Father Pierre Pinet, as well as the two other hands that added information to it, Father Jean Mermet and Father Gabriel Marest. He is currently working on two books, one comprising the late prehistory of the Miami and Illinois peoples, linguistic analyses of their tribe names, e.g., Cahokia, Pepikokia, and an in-depth analysis of the story of the most famous Illinois in history, Marie Rouensa; the other book will be a study of early 18th-century French trader itineraries for Illinois, Indiana and southwestern Michigan. Currently working for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma in the tribe's language revitalisation program, McCafferty is the French-to-English translator of the three dictionaries of the Miami-Illinois language composed by Jesuits in the Illinois Country in the late 1600s and early 1700s, the Jesuit brother Jacques Largillier, the missionary Jean Le Boullenger, and the missionary Pierre Pinet.
Michael Nassaney
Michael S. Nassaney is an archaeologist, author, editor, consultant, and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University. His research interests include the archaeology of colonialism, the fur trade, material analysis, public archaeology, and ethnohistory. From 1998-2020 he served as the principal investigator of the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project, an interdisciplinary program in community service learning that focuses on the site of Fort St. Joseph in Niles, Michigan. Nassaney has published numerous works on the archaeology of the eastern United States including The Archaeology of the North American Fur Trade (2015, University Press of Florida) and Fort St. Joseph Revealed (University Press of Florida, 2019). His forthcoming book (with Dean Anderson and Krysta Ryzewski) is The Historical Archaeology of Michigan (University Press of Florida, 2025).
Guillaume Teasdale, PhD
