American West Center

Patricia Albers
Director, 1995-1998

Dr. Albers left the University of Utah in 1998 and served with distinction at the University of Minnesota’s Native American Studies department. She is currently emeritus.
http://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/alber033

Daniel Craig McCool
Director, 1999-2006Dr.

McCool currently directs the University of Utah’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program. He continues to work on water resource development, public lands policy, voting rights, and Indian water rights.

Matthew Basso
Director, 2006-2012

Dr. Basso is Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. An accomplished public and academic historian, he is the author of Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana's World War II Home Front and editor of Men at Work: Rediscovering Depression-Era Stories from the Federal Writers’ Project. His most recent projects focus, in turn, on settler masculinity in the Pacific World, and the historical experience of old age in the United States.
https://faculty.utah.edu/u0492365-MATTHEW_BASSO/biography/index.hml

Richard Hart
1968-1972

Owner, Hart West Associates

Thomas King
1977-1980

Dr. Thomas King, CM, is a distinguished novelist and nonfiction writer focusing on Native themes. In 2004 he was inducted into the Order of Canada. His The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (2012) won the 2014 RBC Taylor Prize.

Vicente V. Mayer
1970-1974

Dr. Mayer is retired from a long and distinguished career with the U.S. State Department. He served in Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba, and Singapore.

Winston Erickson

Winston Erickson, now retired, worked at the American West Center for many years. He is the author of Sharing the Desert: The Tohono O'odham in History

John Worsencroft
Assistant Director, 2010-2011
Graduate Assistant, 2008-2010

John Worsencroft is a PhD candidate in history at Temple University. His dissertation, "Stability Operations: Military Families in the Postwar Era," is a history of family policies in the Army and Marine Corps, and how gender shapes rights, obligations, and citizenship in America.  Since his stint as assistant director of the American West Center, John has continued to work in public history.  He was the Allen Davis Fellow in Public History in 2012-13, which placed him in the Philadelphia History Museum, working on K-12 educational programming, museum exhibit design, and the day-to-day operations of an urban museum. He plans to defend his dissertation in summer 2017.

Chris Dunsmore
Assistant Director, 2011-2013

In addition to playing various small supporting roles at the American West Center, Chris Dunsmore has worked as a transcriptionist and an oral historian on several AWC projects, from the Pacific Islander Oral History to the Utah Vietnam War Oral History. Over the past five years, his ears and hands have translated a large portion of AWC oral histories into valuable transcripts. Currently, Chris is feverishly transcribing interviews for the HIV/AIDS Oral History Project (some of which he conducted) and for the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute Oral History Project.

Erin Halcomb
Outdoor Recreation Project Lead, 2011-2013

Currently working as associate director of the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Education Center, a field station of the University of Utah.