Postdoctoral Fellows, Scholars, and Visitors

Gregory Simon came to the Center In September 2007. Gregory Simon received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington.  His current research explores urbanization and natural resource management in the American West, and the environmental history and political economy of the Bay Area. In Spring 2009, he will teach "Free Trade, NAFTA, and the Environment." Click here for Gregory Simon's complete biography.

Geneva Gano  is a lecturer in the UCLA Dept. of English, where she is teaching a survey course on Modern American Literature, a seminar titled "Place, Race, and Nation", and a lecture course on the Western.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bill Lane Center for West from 2007-2008. Geneva Gano returned to Stanford after detours along the West coast and Puerto Rico. Her publications include articles on John C. Frémont's 1865 exploration narrative and map; Willa Cather's The Professor's House; and Robinson Jeffers' Tamar (forthcoming). She is currently at work on two book projects. The first, Continent's End, is an extension of her dissertation, which examines the special place of the American West in the literary imagination during the 1920s and 30s. The second is an interdisciplinary consideration of the effects of the Mexican Revolution on U.S. literature and art in the early twentieth century.

Tammy Frisby is the Bill Lane Center Executive Director and Director of Research.  Frisby earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University's Department of Government. She arrived at Stanford in the autumn of 2006 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Bill Lane Center for the American West. She studies Congress, state politics, and regulatory policymaking. Her current work includes research on the role of scientific knowledge and uncertainty in environmental regulation.

Emily Brock is an assistant professor of history at Georgia State University.  Dr. Brock completed her doctorate in environmental history at Princeton University in 2004, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bill Lane Center for the American West from 2004-2006, and was a visiting scholar in the History Department of Stanford University from 2006-2007.  Her current project is on the interactions of forest science, the lumber industry and environmental politics in post-logging landscapes in the twentieth century Pacific Northwest.

Lissa Wadewitz is an Assistant Professor of History at Linfield College.  Dr. Wadewitz completed her Ph.D. in History at UCLA in 2004 and spent 2004-2005 as a postdoctoral fellow in native-newcomer relations at the University of Saskatchewan. Wadewitz's research spans both disciplinary and national borders. Her current interests include transnational environmental and social history (especially with regard to salmon fishing), borderlands history, Ethnohistory, labor and class relations, and the history of inter-ethnic interactions in the transnational West. Dr. Wadewitz was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center from 2005 to 2007.

With Center faculty board member and Stanford professor Karen C. Seto (GES), she is leading a multi-year research project on the political, cultural, and economic drivers of urban growth in the "new Silicon Valleys" of India and China.

Dr. O'Mara received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. She is the author of Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005). Her current research explores comparative urbanization and knowledge-economy development around the Pacific Rim.

O'Mara previously served in the White House and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a political aide and policy analyst, working on health care, welfare, and urban economic development programs.   More here >

Matthew Morse Booker is a visiting scholar at the Spatial History Project and Bill Lane Center in 2008-2009. He completed his PhD in History at Stanford in 2005. He is assistant professor of History at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he teaches environmental history, the history of suburbs, and American history.
At Stanford, he is revising his dissertation for publication as Between the Tides: An Environmental History of San Francisco Bay. He is leading a related project in the Spatial History lab. He is also working on a global history of the oyster during the industrial and urban revolutions of the late nineteenth century. To reach Matthew Booker and for more information, click here

Jon was a Knight Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003, and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004. Jon has also taught courses on environmental history and science in the West in the graduate program in interactive environmental journalism in the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno.

He is currently associate director of The Spatial History Project of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. Research includes the history of conservation, the science of conservation biology, and measuring conservation. He is working on a doctoral dissertation entitled "Critical Habitat" in History at Stanford exploring the science and practice of conservation in the West. He is developing a history of ideas, narratives, science, and practices of conservation of a species in time and space centering this history on the Bay Checkerspot Butterfly.

In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America. He has done special projects on the West and the decline of rural America, and he has followed the entire length of the Lewis and Clark Trail. Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, and Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West. He lives in Seattle.

Peter Friederici teaches journalism at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His latest book is Nature's Restoration: People and Places on the Front Lines of Conservation (Island Press, 2006).

Assignments have taken him into the back canyons of southern Utah's rugged Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, by rope to the top of the Grand Teton in Wyoming, on foot into the redrock backcountry of Canyonlands National Park, and into the dusty fossil boneyards of Utah and Wyoming. From the air over Nebraska he has traced the meandering path of the Platte River to report on how water diversions in Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska adversely affect endangered species. Kurt also has interviewed Robert Redford about the actor's environmental views, written about the debate over the health of Yellowstone's grizzly population, and portrayed the plight of Wilderness Study Areas and how the Bush administration's energy policy could adversely affect them.

Kurt, a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, is the author of the books National Parks of the West for Dummies, Hidden Utah, and Hidden Salt Lake City. He also is a contributor to The Unofficial Guide to Skiing & Snowboarding in the West.

Visitors

Steve Adams Visiting Scholar Spring 2009

Stephen B. Adams is an associate professor of management at the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business, Salisbury University. His research interests are: entrepreneurship, business/government relations, and the development of high-tech regions. He is the author of Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), and (with Orville R. Butler), Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric (Cambridge University Press, 1999). He earned his Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. While at the Lane Center, he is writing Before the Garage, a book on the institutional forces behind the development of Silicon Valley.

Visiting Assistant Professor Peter Alagona 2008-09

In September 2008, the Center  welcomed Peter, a historian, geographer, and science studies scholar as a Visiting Assistant Professor.  He received his PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006.  Before coming to Stanford, he served for two years as a Harvard Environmental Fellow in the Center for the Environment and John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  His teaching and research focus on the histories of land use, natural resource management, environmental politics, and ecological science in the North American West and beyond. He is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled "The Great Endangered Species Debate," about the history of endangered species conservation in California. Read Peter S. Alagona's complete biography.

Erika Bsumek Visiting Scholar Spring 2009

Erika Bsumek is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Indian-made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) as well as a number of articles on Native American history. She is now working on an environmental history of the American West that focuses on the large-scale construction projects and the social visions of the engineers who designed them. It is tentatively titled, "The Concrete West: Engineering Society and Culture in the Arid West, 1900-1970."

Susan Charnley Visiting Scholar Spring 2009

Visiting Scholar Susan Charnley in residence through March 20th. Susan is a Research Social Scientist with the USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Oregon. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford. Her current research focuses on how people can sustain rural, natural resource-based livelihoods in a manner that contributes to conservation and rural community development; and on how formal and informal institutions for forest management influence the production of forest goods and services. She has worked in forest and rangeland ecosystems in North and Central America, and East Africa. While in residence at the Bill Lane Center, she will be working on a book that she is coediting with Tom Sheridan and Gary Nabhan from the University of Arizona entitled Saving the Wide Open Spaces: The Conservation of Biodiversity and Working Landscapes in the American West.

Nancy Dallett Visiting Scholar Fall 2008

Nancy is a public historian at the Arizona State University Public History Program, as well as principal of Projects in the Public Interest, a consulting firm. Nancy's work brings history, art, environmental science, historic preservation, and social issues to the public through collaborative efforts via master plans, exhibitions, events, media, oral histories, and publications. Nancy is a skilled facilitator and planner for museums, historical societies, historic corridors, libraries, arts organizations, neighborhoods, and entire cities. She often collaborates with Freeman/Whitehurst Group, nationally recognized public art planners, to ensure that good history supports public art. In this capacity, Nancy has worked with Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and El Paso, as well as communities in Arizona.

Dallett currently serves as a liaison among Arizona museums, heritage sites, and archives with student interns in the graduate program in Public History at ASU. Trained in public history with a Master's degree from New York University, Nancy is a member of the Scottsdale Historic Preservation Commission, and she is writing historic resources studies and administrative histories for the National Park Service.

Nancy's primary project while in residence with us concerns the planning process for the Museum of the West in Scottsdale, Arizona. Nancy is working with the museum planning committee to identify the audience and the interpretive questions the museum will address, such as "What West? Whose West? And is the West a place? A process?" She is also encouraging the museum to grapple with academic questions about history that have resonance and relevance for the general public.

Kevin Hearle Visiting Scholar 2008-2009

Kevin received his A.B. in English from Stanford in 1980 and his Master of Fine Arts from the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa in 1983 in poetry, and received a Masters (1990) and a Ph.D. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz in 1991.
His first book, Each Thing We Know Is Changed Because We Know It, and Other Poems (Boise: Ahsahta Press of Boise State University, 1994, 1996 & 2006) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poems from that book have been reprinted in numerous anthologies, from California to England.

Hearle was the revision editor for the 2nd edition of The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism (New York: Viking, 1997), co-editor of Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck (Tuscaloosa: U Alabama P, 2002), and the editor of The Essential Mary Austin (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006). He has been a founding member of the editorial boards of The Steinbeck Newsletter, Steinbeck Studies and The Steinbeck Review, and has been an adjunct faculty member at: UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State, Cal State L.A., Santa Clara University and five other colleges and universities. In 2005, Kevin received the Burkhardt Award from Ball State University as the Outstanding Steinbeck Scholar of the year. He has also been one of the voices for the California Legacy Series Radio Anthology (californialegacy.org) at Santa Clara University since that program's inception.

Kevin is writing a book manuscript with the working title Of Race and Men: Race, Ethnicity and Eugenics in the Life and Works of John Steinbeck. He will be building on his previously published essays on miscegenation in The Pastures of Heaven and eugenics in The Grapes of Wrath and Their Blood Is Strong to consider the importance of race and ethnicity in Steinbeck's life and its centrality in much of his literary work.

Susan Nance Visiting Scholar Spring 2009

Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live entertainment, and Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003. She has since published on the histories of parades, civic festivals and the business of tourism, as well as a book, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), documenting uses of Eastern personae in amateur and professional entertainment. Susan's most recent work, Elephant Labor, American Business: Animal Behavior in the Age of Menagerie and Circus (in press) documents the lives and labors of Asian elephants in 19th-century American circuses, and is the first to account for the historical behavior of non-humans in the development of the American entertainment industry. At the Bill Lane Center, she is engaged in a similar project to historicize horse and cattle behavior within the sport of rodeo in Canada and the United States. An experimental portion of this project appeared last year as “Becoming Bodacious: Aufstieg und Fall eines Rodeo-Bullen [Becoming Bodacious: The Rise and Fall of a Rodeo Bull],” in Ich, das Tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in Kunst, Wissenschaft und Geschichte, edited by Keike Fuhlbrügge, Jessica Ullrich and Friedrich Weltzien (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2008). The curious may visit: www.susannance.com

Glenn Willumson Visiting Scholar Fall 2008

Glenn is an associate professor of art history and the director of the graduate program in museology at the University of Florida. Previously he held positions as senior curator at the Palmer Museum of Art and curator at the Getty Research Institute. His research interests embrace museums, photography, and American visual culture. His publications include articles about American visual culture, museology, and the history of photography including his book, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay. He is currently completing a manuscript about the pictorial representation of the first transcontinental railroad. Willumson is the recipient of fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Yale University, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Kress Foundation.

While in residence at the Center, Glenn is working on the project "Iron Muse: The Pictorial Legacy of the Transcontinental Railroad." Willumson's research analyzes the visual representation of the first transcontinental railroad and the ways in which it brought about a new understanding of the post-Civil War role of the American West. His research centers on the photographs of the construction of the railroad (1865-1869) but discusses the railroad companies use of a variety of media—paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs—to frame the construction as the vehicle for the redemption and ideological reconstruction of the United States after the Civil War. His work considers this visual culture, not as isolated objects, but as artifacts that carry on a complex interaction with texts, with each other, and with the culture and society that viewed them. It identifies the historical "silences" that pervade the depictions of the transcontinental railroad and the representations of the Western landscape in the mid-nineteenth century.

Bob Wilson Visiting Scholar 2008-2009

Bob Wilson earned his PhD in geography from the University of British Columbia, and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University. During his stay at the Bill Lane Center, Dr. Wilson will be working on a number of projects. Click here for Robert Wilson's complete biography.

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