John R. Legg earned his Ph.D. in history at George Mason University and an M.A. and graduate certificate in public history at Virginia Tech. He graduated with a BA in History from Middle Georgia State University. He currently teaches history at Loyola University New Orleans and serves as an affiliate fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Legg is an historian of the Northern Plains and Indigenous-US-Canadian borderlands. His book project (under contract with the University of Nebraska Press) examines how eastern Dakota people maintained kinship, practiced diplomacy, and asserted sovereignty through mobility across lands claimed and developed by the United States and Canada. His writing has appeared in the Western Historical Quarterly, Civil War History, and Great Plains Quarterly. See his CV for more information on his other public-facing essays, projects, and presentations. 

Legg's work in digital public history explores Indigenous cultural preservation and authority in public and digital spaces. He organized a forthcoming special issue of The Public Historian on these subjects, as well as others on the topics of Indigneous authority in NAGPRA as well as digitization practices. With Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Legg is co-editing Degrees of Liberation: Campus Activism, Public History, and the Struggle for Educational Justice, under contract with SUNY Press for its Praxis: Theory in Action series.

He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with his wife, Dr. Jennifer Andrella. On weekends, you can probably find them on the Gulf Coast eating shrimp or taking photos of cats.