Shannon D. Smith

Full-time Faculty - Oglala Lakota College

Contact Information:

505 N. Elm St.
Gordon, NE 69343
Department of History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
Phone: (308) 360-2075
E-mail:

Joined the Department:

August 1999

I am a full-time instructor at Oglala Lakota College, a tribal college located on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I have been teaching here since August 2002. My graduate studies focus on women in the west and American Indian history, particulary on the high plains of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. I consider myself a social historian and am especially interested in the changes in American society as they affected women and Indians from the mid-1800s to around the turn of the 20th century. I also spend a considerable amount of time working with Lakota Sioux historians to promote the teaching of social justice and the growing impact of globalization on Indigenous Peoples.

I have taught a 4/4 load of courses in History, American Government, and Globalization for 12 semesters. I am also a distance learning specialist and have taught online courses taken by students around the country for the last six years.

My full-time teaching, coupled with raising my daughter who graduated from high school last May, slowed my PhD work down considerably, but I have managed to publish an intro to a book, My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearney Massacre by Frances Carrington as well as my Masters' Thesis, Give Me Eighty Men: Women and the Myth of the Fetterman Massacre both from the University of Nebraska Press. You can find links to the books in the Links section below.

Expertise:

• Women
• Great Plains
• Colonialism and Decolonization
• North American West
• Native American

Education:

B.A. Computer Science, University of Nebraska-Kearney, 1982
M.A. History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2001
Ph.D. Student, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2002-present

I spent 18 years in the software industry in New York City, Boston, and Denver prior to entering graduate school. I uprooted my life and my daughter to go to Lincoln, and subsequently my hometown of Gordon, Nebraska, in order to write and teach history. When I am not teaching, researching, or writing, you can find me golfing, skiing, or driving to Montana to visit my significant other.