Past Postdoctoral Scholars

Gregory Simon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Denver in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences. He earned his PhD in Geography (2007) from the University of Washington before serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Bill Lane Center from 2007-2009.

Gregory's research focuses on environmental governance in the US West, particularly among actors at the conservation/development and science/policy interface. He remains a Research Associate in Stanford's Spatial History Lab in connection with his research on the environmental history and planning politics of wldland/urban interface fires in California. He is also involved with a Stanford University Woods Institute Grant examining how water recycling programs in California are influenced by scientific uncertainty around emerging contaminants.

Geneva Gano is Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies and Latino Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. 2008-09 she was a lecturer in the UCLA Dept. of English teaching a survey course on Modern American Literature, a seminar titled "Place, Race, and Nation", and a lecture course on the Western.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Bill Lane Center for West from 2007-2008. Geneva Gano returned to Stanford after detours along the West coast and Puerto Rico. Her publications include articles on John C. Frémont's 1865 exploration narrative and map; Willa Cather's The Professor's House; and Robinson Jeffers' Tamar(forthcoming). She is currently at work on two book projects. The first, Continent's End, is an extension of her dissertation, which examines the special place of the American West in the literary imagination during the 1920s and 30s. The second is an interdisciplinary consideration of the effects of the Mexican Revolution on U.S. literature and art in the early twentieth century. Click here for her current CV.

Tammy Frisby is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where she also teaches in the political science department and the university's public policy program. She studies both national and state politics. She is currently writing a book about the politics of health care reform. She arrived at Stanford in the autumn of 2006 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Bill Lane Center for the American West. From September 2007-August 2009, she was Executive Director of the Bill Lane Center. Frisby earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University's Department of Government.

Emily Brock is Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of South Carolina. She specializes in the history of the field sciences, environmental history, and the history of the North American West. Her current research is on the interactions of forest science, the lumber industry and environmental politics in post-logging landscapes in the twentieth century Pacific Northwest. She holds a doctorate from Princeton University in history and history of science as well as a master's degree in ecology from the University of Oregon. In 2004-2006 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Lane Center for the Study of the North American West, a visiting scholar in the Stanford history department in 2006-2007, and was the 2008 Sterling Senior Research Fellow in Pacific Northwest History. Before arriving at USC, Professor Brock taught at Georgia State University.

Lissa Wadewitz is an Assistant Professor of History at Linfield College.  Dr. Wadewitz completed her Ph.D. in History at UCLA in 2004 and spent 2004-2005 as a postdoctoral fellow in native-newcomer relations at the University of Saskatchewan. Wadewitz's research spans both disciplinary and national borders. Her current interests include transnational environmental and social history (especially with regard to salmon fishing), borderlands history, Ethnohistory, labor and class relations, and the history of inter-ethnic interactions in the transnational West. Dr. Wadewitz was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center from 2005 to 2007.