Karen Marrero is a historian of early North American, Native American, and borderlands history at Wayne State University. Her research focuses on interactions between 18th- and early 19th-century Indigenous peoples and settlers in the Great Lakes. She teaches undergraduate and graduate students in early North American history and historical methodology at Wayne State University in Detroit, an institution located on an international border that is committed to welcoming a diverse student body. As a first-generation college student who worked for many years in the private sector before pursuing her PhD, Marrero is both attuned to the needs of students who are new to the culture of academia and dedicated to making changes to that culture so her students feel at home and empowered. She co-created and continues to co-organize the Borderland Stories International student conference, an annual cross-border forum for the presentation of work by undergraduate and graduate students from the United States and Canada. Marrero also participated in the National Endowment for Humanities Next Generation Humanities PhD Faculty Mentoring Fellows program, which gave her the opportunity at her university to work with colleagues across the social sciences and humanities to train students to work in a variety of settings outside academia.