Dr. John R. Legg is an adjunct professor of history at Loyola University New Orleans and Lamar University. Beginning in 2026, he will also serve as an Affiliate Fellow with the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for the 2026–2031 term. As a scholar of Indigenous, public, and digital history, his work examines how Dakota and other Indigenous nations asserted sovereignty through mobility, diplomacy, and everyday cultural practice across the Northern Plains and the U.S.–Canadian borderlands, especially during the Civil War Era and the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War.

As a public historian, Legg has worked as a tour docent at a historic house museum, interned as the American Civil War Museum, and engaged in several oral history, digital history, and physical exhibit-building projects. Legg's interested in the theoretical conversations about public history. He organized a roundtable on Indigenous cultural preservation in public and digital spaces, with Jennifer Andrella, Heather Bruegl, Meranda Roberts, and Matthew Jennings (resubmitting to a leading journal January 2026), and he is co-editing a volume with Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd on the intersections of campus activism and public history.

His research has received support from the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research, the Agricultural History Society, and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

His public-facing writing has appeared in the Star Tribune (Minneapolis), MinnPost (St. Paul), NCPH’s History@Work, and other outlets.

At Loyola, Legg teaches courses in U.S. history, Indigenous America, and digital history. At Lamar, he teaches Native history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, along with U.S. history survey courses.