Alyssa Kreikemeier
Alyssa Kreikemeier
Assistant Professor
311C Administration Building
Alyssa Kreikemeier’s scholarship and teaching address environmental and public history in relationship with the peoples and places of the Western United States. Her first book is an atmospheric history of the American West which shows how managing air as a natural resource both aided and subverted state expansion over the long twentieth century.
- Ph.D., Boston University, 2023
- MA, Boston University, 2018
- Ed.M., Harvard University, 2017
- BA, Montana State University, 2012
- BA, Montana State University, 2012
Courses
- HIST 112 United States History II
- HIST 213 Race and Ethnicity through the Ages
- HIST 316 American Indian History
- HIST 320 20th-century America: The Colossus
- HIST 329 Idaho and the Pacific Northwest
- HIST 424 American Environmental History
- HIST 462 History of the American West
- Environmental History & Cultural Landscapes
- Modern U.S.
- Public History
- Native American and Indigenous Studies
- Ancient Sites in Modern Times: Bandelier National Monument in the Twenty First Century (National Park Service, 2025)
- “From Ground to Sky: Arid Visions and the Making of the Southwest,” Environmental History, Vol. 29 no. 4 (Oct. 2024)
- “Sonoran Soundscapes: Military Airspace and Public Lands” Perspectives on History, Feb. 2, 2023
- “Whose Heritage? U.S. History Textbooks, American Exceptionalism, and Hispanophobia” in Contested Commemoration in U.S. History: Diverging Public Interpretations (Routledge, 2019).
Unsettled by a personal sense of dislocation when she found herself on the urban east coast for graduate school, Alyssa became driven to explore the relationships between people and places, beginning with the region she knows and loves best. She took up environmental history and the U.S. West as topics of scholarship after beginning her Ph.D. intending to study cultural empire and the U.S. in Latin America. Prior to finding her stride as an environmental historian, Kreikemeier researched intercultural exchange and socially engaged art through education. She has published with Routledge, the Teachers College Record, and Environmental History. Alyssa has also written an administrative history of Bandelier National Monument published by the National Park Service. That book, Ancient Sites in Modern Times, incorporates nearly 40 oral histories in addition to archival research.
- Global Decolonization Fellow, Boston University, Pardee School of Global Studies, 2022
- Kluge Center Fellow, Library of Congress, 2022
- American Historical Association and NASA Fellow in Aerospace History, 2021–2022
- Fellow, Women’s International Study Center, Santa Fe, NM, 2021
- Edwin S. and Ruth M. White Prize, Boston University Center for the Humanities, 2021
- Mellon Foundation National Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Diversity Workshop Fellow, 2021
- David Hall Award for Outstanding Dissertation Work in History, Boston University, 2021
- Los Angeles Westerners Fellowship, Autry Museum of the American West, 2019
- Charles Redd Fellowship Award in Western American History, 2019
- Orlando Ridout V Fieldwork Fellowship, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2018