Barr’s first book, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) was the recipient of six book awards.  The book and other articles in various peer-reviewed journals and edited book collections have focused on the intersections of European colonialism and indigenous sovereignty as well as regional, continental, and hemispheric models for understanding the history of the Americas.

Barr’s work combines research in Spanish and French archives with anthropological, archaeological, and historical methods and sources to address questions of Native American sovereignty and how European empires came to impinge on it (or not) over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, as Indian nations, confederacies, and kingdoms exerted power not simply within their own borders but over newly arriving Europeans.  In seeking to illuminate the extent and limits of Indian power, Barr’s research explores how Indians understood territorial geopolitics and how ideas of sovereignty became translated into social and political practices on the ground, extending power over real places and peoples.

Barr also studies the ways in which race and gender functioned as key components of competing native and European power systems.  Her current book projects, for example, include a comparative study of African and Indian enslavement in which colonists created contrasting categories of identity and humanity in early America as well as a study of the legend of a mystical “woman in blue” who appeared in spiritual form to Indians and exhorted them to seek out Christian conversion against a backdrop of Spanish slave raiding in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century northern provinces of New Spain.  The question of how race and gender interacted to create vying cultural, moral, and geopolitical spaces across colonial landscapes thus animates the research projects upon which her work is now focused.