Visitors

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.

Visiting Assistant Professor Bob Wilson 2008—09

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. While at the Bill Lane Center, Dr Wilson is working on his book: On Seeking Refuge: An Environmental History of the Pacific Flyway. He is also researching and writing articles on what will ultimately be a new, book-length study tentatively titled Landscapes of Promise and Betrayal: A Historical Geography of Japanese-American Internment. And finally he will be completing an article on mules as technology in western hard-rock mines during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Read Bob Wilson's complete biography.

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.

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—09

Kevin Hearle 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 Willumson 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.