About Flannery Burke

I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico and attended the United World College of the American West in Las Vegas, New Mexico. That region of New Mexico is at the center of my next book project, tentatively titled Hercules Jr. and the Lost Territory. The book will describe the experience of my grandfather’s great uncles, Herculano and Edmundo Baca (buried as Edmund Baca in Arlington National Cemetery). The lost territory of the title refers to the World War I battlefield where Edmundo was killed, but also to that land lost to Nuevomexicanes via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the land lost by Native peoples through Spanish colonization, the landscape lost in the region’s Calf Canyon fire of 2022, and my family’s lost connection to that land stewarded by Herculano’s and Edmundo’s parents, José Herculano and Anna.

Grave markers for José Herculano and Herculano Baca in Shoemaker, New Mexico

I teach in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University and specialize in environmental humanities, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and American regional cultures. I hold degrees from Bryn Mawr College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I previously taught at California State University-Northridge, a period of my life that inspired an enduring love for the city of Los Angeles. The classroom is my favorite place, and I’m always eager to turn any place – from cities to bookstores to Bureau of Land Management land – into classrooms, and anyone — from my formal instructors in college and graduate school to my own students and family (including our dog) – into teachers. (Some of my friends and family might also accuse me of trying to turn them into students.) I’ve published peer-reviewed work regarding the teaching of American history and culture and in 2013 – 2014 I held a Roving Scholar Fulbright Fellowship, a fellowship unique to Fulbright Norway. I visited Norwegian secondary school students and teachers in dozens of schools throughout the country from above the Arctic Circle to the Norwegian Canning Museum in Stavanger to discuss American culture.

I have appeared on PBS’s American Experience, Travel with Rick Steves, New Mexico PBS’s ¡Colores! and St. Louis on the Air.

My favorite activities are hiking in New Mexico, eating my spouse’s cooking, watching my child’s film productions, and reading the work of Saint Louis Literary Prize winners.