Max Flomen

Atlantic World, Borderlands

Teaching Fields

• Early America & the Atlantic World
  
• Native American History
• Borderlands
  

Degrees

• Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2018
• M.A., McGill University, 2011
• B.A., McGill University, 2009

Research Interests

Dr. Flomen is a historian of colonial North America. His forthcoming monograph, Beyond Mountains: Maroons & Rebellions in the Borderlands of Northern Mexico, 1500-1840 (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) is a history of self-liberation struggles in northern Mexico and the American Southwest. It argues that Native peoples opposed colonial regimes along ideological and spatial axes in ways that convinced non-Indigenous peoples to support this emancipatory counterculture. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and ethnohistory, his work tracks the circulation of anti-colonial epistemologies and practices among the Indigenous nations of the interior. Emphasizing the intersection of Native and African American aspirations while bridging the fields of Borderlands and Atlantic history, Beyond Mountains rewrites the history of slavery and emancipation from a continental and long durée perspective. It challenges the racialization of resistance to colonialism in the early modern world, which has cloistered the joint efforts of Indigenous and African peoples to build independent communities and failed to recognize the development of a coherent movement opposing Euro-Christian imperialism. 

At WVU, Dr. Flomen teaches a variety of courses on colonialism and empire, and works with graduate students studying Indigenous history, the Atlantic World, borderlands, and the Civil War in the West.

Courses

• HIST 152: US History to 1865
  
• HIST 256: Era of the American Revolution, 1763-1790
• HIST 264: Native American History
• HIST 302: Practicing History
• Hist 393: Atlantic Empires
  
• HIST 441: Colonial America, 17th Century
• HIST 442: Colonial America, 18th Century
• HIST 731: Readings In American History, 1585-1763
• HIST 732: Seminar in American History, 1585-1763

Graduate Students

Ph.D. Students

• John “Jack” Weaver
• Lani Kasten-Coffman

Publications

Books

Beyond Mountains: Maroons & Rebellions in the Borderlands of Northern Mexico, 1500-1840
(University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2026).

Articles

"Bad Talks: Rebels, Rumors, and the Politics of Fear in the Gulf Borderlands, 1700s-1760s," in Paul Barba, ed., Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries, 1700-1860: Bonds of Rebellion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), 23-48. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-82365-7_2

"Apaches y comanches. El limite a la colonizacion de Nueva Espana," Desperta Ferro Historia Moderna no. 68 (February 2024): https://www.despertaferro-ediciones.com/revistas/numero/dragones-de-cuera-salvaje-oest-espanol-noramerica/

“The Long War for Texas: Maroons, Renegades, Warriors, and Alternative Emancipations in the Texas Borderlands, 1835-1845,” Journal of the Civil War Era Volume 11, No. 1 (March 2021): 36-61. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/783006/pdf