Department of History
Heather Fryer, PhD
Professor
Director, American Studies Program
402.280.2656
Humanities Center 227
HeatherFryer@creighton.edu
As a specialist in 20th century US social and cultural history, Heather Fryer offers courses on migration, labor, gender, social identity and community, collective memory, and conceptions of what it means to be "American" in the post-Reconstruction era. Her interest in "encounter" in the post-frontier West forms the unifying theme of her varied scholarly work. Her book, Perimeters of Democracy: Inverse Utopias and the Wartime Social Landscape in the American West reveals the prevalence of federal "reservations" in the West as part of a patterned response to racial and political anxieties in wartime. She has presented portions of her new project--an examination of the intersections of race, class, gender, and religion in the professional and private writings of anthropologist Rosalie Hankey Wax—at a variety of conferences and in journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Dr. Fryer is also currently the editor of the journal Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research.
PhD (2002), Boston College
BA (1989), Reed College
Guest Editor (with Robbie Lieberman), Special Issue: “Envisioning Peace, Performing Justice: Art, Activism, and the Cultural Politics of Peacemaking,” Peace and Change: a Journal of Peace Research 40:1 (January 2015).
Perimeters of Democracy: Inverse Utopias and the Wartime Social Landscape in the American West Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture ed. Heather Fryer, Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art/dist. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
“Within the Folds of the Complex: Art, Activism, and the Cultural Politics of Peacemaking,” Peace and Change 40:1 (January 2015).
“The Song of the Stitches: Feminism and Factionalism at Tule Lake,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (Spring 2010): 673-698.
“Miné Okubo’s War” in Going Her Own Road, ed. Elena Tajima Creef and Greg Robinson, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008, 82-96.
Creighton College of Arts & Sciences Award for Professional Excellence in Scholarship (2012)
Journal of the West Article Prize for Best “About the West” Feature for “Pioneers All: Civic Symbolism and Social Change in War-Boom Portland” (2000)
