Chris H. Lewis, Ph.D.
Biography
I grew up in Salem, Oregon in the 1960s and 1970s. After moving to San Diego, California in the mid-1970s, I attended Abraxas High School in San Diego and then went on to college at San Diego State University and majored in Psychology. After flirting with pursuing graduate work in Human Ecology at the University of California at Davis, Anthropology at the University of Oregon, and American Literature at the University of Oregon, I decided to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in American Studies in the mid-1980s. After completing my Ph.D. in 1991, I taught at Indiana University at Indianapolis as a visiting assistant professor of history from 1991 to 1993. From 1993 to the present, I teach American Studies in the Sewall Academic Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
My research interests include the environmental history of the United States, the social and environmental impact of global development, and the historical debated about who is an American and what are the shared values and principles that America stands for. My research and teaching focus on how social and cultural conflicts can be understood as ongoing debates between different perspectives and worldviews. For example, while Native Americans saw the American West as settled and developed by Indian peoples for thousands of years, Anglo-Americans and Europeans saw the American West as an unsettled, undeveloped wilderness waiting to be conquered. By analyzing these competing perspectives we can better understand American history and culture.
I am currently a Faculty research and testsite liaison for the American Studies Crossroads Project. The larger goal of the Crossroads Project is to study how the internet and the global resources of the world-wide web will affect American Studies teaching and researching. I have developed and taught two American Studies web-based courses. My experience teaching with the internet and developing curriculum materials using the world-wide web has convinced me that the internet can be a powerful tool to improve American Studies teaching.