From 1973 to 1990, she was a Research Historian at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico; in 1990, she was awarded her doctorate (PhD) in history from the University of California, San Diego.
[1] According to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's research profile, Radding's research on "Latin American colonial history focus on the intersections between environmental and ethnographic history"; she is particular interested in the imperial borderlands of the Spanish and Portuguese American empires and the way that indigenous people shaped society there.
[2] Her published works include Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914 (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), which she co-edited with Paul Readman and Chad Bryant, and Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Duke University Press, 2005).
[5] In Ethnography, Barbara A. Sommer wrote that the book offered a "sweeping, conceptually driven analysis of Sonora and Chiquitos" which "extend[s] ethnohistory to the Ibero-American periphery and reconfigure[s] the concept of frontier", while her "bold comparative approach" is her "most salient contribution to the historiography".
[6] In The International Review of History, Stuart McCook reiterated this point, arguing that Radding "weaves the stories of these borderlands together to develop an innovative comparative study".