My main teaching and research interests focus on the history, culture, and landscapes of the American West.  I regularly teach undergraduate courses such as HIS 368 Making of the American West that focuses on the history of the region up to 1900 and HIS 369 The American West Transformed that examines western history since 1900.  When I teach the junior level writing course, HIS 300W, it has also centered on the West, usually around the Lewis and Clark expedition.  On the graduate level, I regularly teach HIS 592, a graduate reading seminar on the West and HIS 602, a research and writing seminar on the region.

My research also examines the region’s history through culture, environment, and landscape.  My publications have focused in three main areas including Atomic History, Repeat Photography, and music. This includes a book on the history of uranium mining in the West, an edited volume on Atomic Culture, three  rephotographic books about a Wyoming photographer in which I located and rephotographed his images a century later, and the first book that examines songs about cowboys and Indians that were played on wind-up phonographs between 1902 and 1918.

In addition to the West, I regularly teach HIS 370, the history of U.S. Sports.  As a former college basketball player and a lifetime sports fan, I love to help students learn about how sports can serve as a window into bigger issues of race, class, gender, religion, immigration, and culture in American History.

I also serve as the Public History coordinator for graduate students and regularly teach HIS 502, the Introduction to Public History course, and help students coordinate public history internships and final projects.

Publications

Talking Machine West: A History and Catalogue of Tin Pan Alley’s Western Recordings, 1902-1918.  Normal: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.

*Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular Culture and American Culture from the Popular Culture Association for 2017.

*Certificate of Merit from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research for 2018. “Seeing Arizona, Imagining Mars: Deserts, Canals, Global Climate Change, and the American West.” The Journal of Arizona History 58, No. 4 (Winter 2017): 331-350.

*C. L. Sonnichsen Award for best article in 2017 by The Journal of Arizona History. Wyoming Revisited: Rephotographing the Scenes of Joseph E. Stimson.  Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 2014

*Honorable Mention Best Book in Wyoming History, Wyoming Historical Society. Passage to Wonderland: Rephotographing J.E. Stimson’s Views of the Cody Road to Yellowstone National Park, 1903 and 2008. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2013.

*Honorable Mention Best Book in Wyoming History, Wyoming Historical Society. “These Men Play Real Polo: The History of an Elite Sport in the ‘Cowboy’ State, 1890-1930,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History Spring 2009: 3-22.            

*Awarded best magazine article by Wyoming State Historical Society

*Named finalist for 2010 Spur Award for the Western Short Nonfiction category by the Western Writers of America

Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  Co-edited with Scott Zeman. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, Atomic Culture Series, 2004

Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West.  Boulder: University Press of Colorado, Mining the West Series, 2002.