David Wrobel (Ph.D., Ohio University) is a scholar of the North American West, Regionalism, American Thought and Culture, Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century U.S., Historiography, and Modern American Literature. He currently serves as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, holds the Merrick Chair in Western American History, and became the inaugural David L. Boren Professor at OU in 2016. He is President Elect (2018-2019) and will be President (2019-2020) of the Western History Association. David teaches HIST 1493, the introductory U.S. Survey: 1865-Present, upper-division undergraduate courses on the Progressive Era: 1890-1920, the Great Depression and New Deal, John Steinbeck, and Modern American Thought and Culture, graduate courses on the history and historiography of the 19th- and 20th-century North American West, and courses for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). He is the author of America’s West: A History, 1890-1950 (Cambridge UP, 2017); Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism, from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (New Mexico UP, 2013), winner of the Western Heritage Award for Nonfiction; Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory and the Creation of the American West (UP Kansas, 2002); The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (UP Kansas, 1993); and numerous articles and essays, including “Teaching The Grapes of Wrath in the Digital Humanities Age” (Steinbeck Review, Spring 2019); “Social Protest Literature in California,” for American Literature in Transition: The 1930s, ed., Ichiro Takayoshi (Cambridge UP, 2018); “Considering Frontiers and Empires: George Kennan’s Siberia and the United States’ West,” Western Historical Quarterly, 46 (Autumn 2015): 284-309, winner of the Oscar O. Winther Award from the Western History Association; “Regionalism and Social Protest During John Steinbeck’s Years of Greatness, 1936-1939,” in Michael C. Steiner, ed., Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West (UP Oklahoma, 2013); and “Exceptionalism and Globalism: Travel Writers and the Nineteenth-Century American West," reprinted in David Roediger, ed., The Best American History Essays of 2008 (2008). He co-edited Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (UP Kansas, 2001); and Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (UP Kansas, 1997). His current book project is "John Steinbeck's America, 1930-1968: A Cultural History." He co-edits The Modern American West book series (UP Arizona). Professor Wrobel is also a dedicated promoter of partnerships between the academy and the schools and has participated in and directed numerous K-12 teacher institutes and workshops since 2000. He is also a participant in the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer Program and held the position of Senior Research Fellow in Western American History at the Beinecke Library and Lamar Center, Yale University (2005-2006). He has served as President (2007- 2008) of the American Historical Association's Pacific Coast Branch, and President of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society (2004-2006). In 2015, he received the Holden Award for Teaching Excellence, from OU's College of Arts & Sciences.
