Well, of course, it’s a long story, but I’ll keep it brief.
I had the good fortune of meeting President Sauli Niinistö at the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki during the Fulbright Finland Orientation in August 2017.
I was born in Illinois and raised in small towns in northwestern Iowa and south central Pennsylvania. There were many highs and lows during those formative years, the details of which I’ll spare you. Perhaps the highest of the highs, however, were the friendships I made, some of which led to the formation of Sable Days, a rock n’ roll band that compensated for technical shortcomings with a boatload of enthusiasm. Our band was about the music. But it was really about each other. My love for everyone in and around Sable Days–and for music–continues to this day.
I can’t really remember when I haven’t been interested in history, and it wasn’t a difficult decision to declare a History major during my first year at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, where my dad was a professor of anthropology and sociology. I initially thought I wanted to be a secondary school teacher–right up until student teaching, that is. That’s when I realized I wanted to spend my life researching, writing, and interacting with others on what I like to think of as a “higher intellectual plane.”
That decision led me first to the University of Wyoming and then to the University of Oklahoma, where I began what has become my life’s work. I completed my M.A. in History in 1998 and my Ph.D. in the same field in 2003, specializing in American Indian and United States history. In 2003, I became the Assistant Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The following year, I joined the History Department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and in 2010, I accepted a position as Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2017-2018, I served as the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in American Studies in the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki in Helsinki, Finland, and in the fall of 2018 I was promoted to full professor in American Studies at UNC.
I have served as the coordinator of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies major concentration and minor at UNC from 2010-2013, 2014-2015, spring 2016 to 2017, and spring 2020 to the present. I’ve also served as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2014-2017. In the summer of 2019, it was my distinct honor to serve as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tübingen, in Tübingen, Germany.
You can learn more about me as a teacher and researcher by clicking on the links above and here.