Heather Fryer joined the Creighton faculty in 2004 after completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Boston College. She holds a BA in political science from Reed College and received a doctorate in history from Boston College in 2002. As a specialist in 20th century US social and cultural history, Dr. 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” as a twentieth-century phenomenon forms the unifying theme of her scholarly work.
Her forthcoming book Enclosed Worlds in Open Space: Federal Communities and Social Experience in the American West (University of Nebraska Press) examines the political and social impacts of various federal “reservations” in the West. Current projects include a study of political conflicts between small and large Western states (under the working title, “Why Oregonians Hate Californians, Coloradans Hate Texans, and New Mexicans Hate Them Both”); studies of the Japanese-American internment in American visual culture; and an examination of the intersections of race, class, gender, religion and politics in the academic and private writings of anthropologist Rosalie Hankey Wax (1911-1998).
As an extension of her historical research, Dr. Fryer served as principal curator, essayist and catalogue editor for the 2002 exhibition “Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture” at the McMullen Museum of Art. The exhibition presented 38 images of the American West from multiple eras and viewpoints in an effort to form an inclusive picture of the region’s visual traditions. To view the exhibit, click here.
Dr. Fryer sits on the advisory boards of the Women and Gender Studies Program, the Native American Studies Program, and the Honors Program and has served as co-director of the of American Studies Program since 2007.
Click here for Dr. Fryer's Curriculum Vitae.