nature and history 2009 neh institute

Nature and History at the Nation's Edge

Field Institute in Environmental & Borderlands History

2009 NEH Summer Institute
for University and College Teachers

June 14-July 11

Faculty and Staff

We've brought together a remarkable set of scholars and experts to participate in the summer institute.

Guest Faculty

Dan Flores, History, University of Montana
Jesus Garcia, Arizona Sonora Desert Museum
Mark Klett, School of Art, Arizona State University
Dale Curtis Miles
Eric Meeks, Northern Arizona University
Stephen Pyne, Arizona State University
Cynthia Radding, History, University of North Carolina
Jupiter Martinez Ramirez, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Hermosillo, Sonora
Harley Shaw
Joe Truett
Raymond Turner, USGS

University of Arizona

Diane Austin, Bureau of Applied Anthropology
Cass Fey, Center for Creative Photography
Diana Hadley, Office of Ethnohistory
Oscar Martinez, History
J .C. Mutchler, History, University of Arizona-South
Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Anthropology
Veronica Reyes, Special Collections
Cecilia Rosales, Division of Community, Environment and Policy, College of Public Health
Thomas Sheridan, Anthropology
Robert Varady, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy
Scott Whiteford, Latin American Studies

Summer Institute Staff

Cynthia Malbrough, Business Manager
Stephanie Capaldo
Megan Prins

Principal Faculty

Katherine Morrissey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona. As an environmental and cultural historian of the 19th- and 20th-century North American West, Morrissey has published books and articles that explore regionalism in a bi-national context (Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire) and visual representations of the Southwestern environment (Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s). Her current book project examines the environmental and cultural history of mining environmental conflicts in the early twentieth-century West, including those along the United States/Mexico and United States/Canada borders. She is the PI for two National Park Service Desert Southwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies grants and serves as an elected member of the Executive Committee for the American Society for Environmental History.
Read more >

Paul Hirt is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department at Arizona State University. He specializes in environmental history and the American West, with particular expertise in rural and wild landscapes, natural resources, environmental change, and the history of environmental thought. He has written or edited three books and two-dozen articles, and given more than seventy presentations on nature and culture in the American West. Hirt is the PI of a project titled Nature, Culture, and History at the Grand Canyon, currently funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Public Programs, Interpreting America’s Historic Places implementation grant. He also serves as Board President of the Tucson-based Sky Island Alliance, a regional nonprofit conservation organization with research and community conservation programs throughout the bi-national Sky Islands region.
Read more >

Samuel Truett is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands which explores the social and environmental history of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. In 2002 he co-organized, with Latin American historian Elliott Young, a Continental Crossroads Symposium to open up new critical conversations among historians of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. That project, sponsored by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, resulted in the co-edited volume, Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History. His current book project, "Old New Worlds: Ruins, Borderlands, and Empire in America," examines the historical fascination with ruins and antiquity in the United States, Mexico, and Central America, asking how newcomers engaged the ghosts of prior "civilizations" (and eventually their own ghosts) in the borderlands of American empires and nations. Broadly interested in conversations that cut across traditional national, colonial, and cultural boundaries in the history of the Americas, Truett has been a J. William Fulbright Lecturer at University of Tampere, Finland.
Read more >

Marsha Weisiger is Associate Professor of History at New Mexico State University, where she teaches environmental history and the history of the U.S. West. She is the author of Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country, an environmental history of livestock grazing, which is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. Also trained in urban and public history, Weisiger has extensive experience in historic preservation. Previous publications include Land of Plenty: Oklahomans in the Cotton Fields of Arizona, 1933-1942, winner of the Angie Debo Prize. In addition to her scholarship, Weisiger has been an innovative educator and public intellectual. She was the co-PI on a project funded by a Focus Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which facilitated the creation of a new pedagogy for the graduate history program at NMSU, focusing on transnational, thematic reading seminars. In 2003, she organized “Leopold Forum: El Lobo,” which brought together historians, scientists, ranchers, environmentalists, and government officials for a public conversation on the past, present, and future of the endangered Mexican Gray Wolf, held on the NMSU campus. She is currently a member of the editorial board for Environmental History.
Read more >