Douglas Seefeldt

Douglas Seefeldt is an Assistant Professor in the department of history and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Doug is a western historian with teaching and research interests in environmental history and public memory. He teaches courses on the twentieth-century North American West, the mythic West, North American environmental history, modern U.S., and digital history.

Doug grew up in Littleton, Colorado and took a B.A. in cultural studies from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, an M.A. in history from the University of Oregon, and his Ph.D. in history from Arizona State University. He was a 2001-2003 Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Virginia where he was a Lecturer in the Media Studies Program and conducted research in digital scholarship at the Virginia Center for Digital History (VCDH). He also served as the Director of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Project and as a Lecturer in the history department at UVa.

Doug directed several Lewis and Clark-related digital projects at VCDH including the digital documentary film Lewis and Clark's Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia; the digital publication history archive, The Biddle Edition Archive; and served as historical consultant for the Telly Award-winning documentary film Virginia's Lewis & Clark: Roots of a Legacy broadcast nationally on PBS. He currently is conducting research for "Mapping Jefferson's West," a digital article on the development of Thomas Jefferson's conceptions of the American West from his childhood to 1803 based on his digital archive project Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, that is a collaboration between VCDH and CDRH. Doug's other CDRH digital initiative, Documenting the Mountain Meadows Massacre, is slated for completion by the sesquicentennial of that event in the fall of 2007.

Doug has been supported in his research by fellowships from the Los Angeles Corral of Westerners at the Huntington Library; the Friends of the Princeton University Library, Princeton University; and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University. His print publications include:

• "Constructing Comanche Pasts: Landscape, Memory and the Cuerno Verde Rest Area," New Mexico Historical Review, special issue on Comanches and New Mexicans, forthcoming, winter 2006.
• "Creating Kearny: Forging a Historical Identity for a Central Arizona Mining Community," Journal of Arizona History, 46, no. 1 (spring 2005): 1-32.
• "Oñate's Foot: Histories, Landscapes and Contested Memories in the Southwest," Chapter 5 in Across the Continent: Jefferson, Lewis and Clark and the Making of America, Douglas Seefeldt, Jeffrey L. Hantman, and Peter Onuf, eds. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 169-209.

He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and two daughters.