Andrew Offenburger

Education

• PhD 2014, Yale University
• MA 2008, Yale University
• BA 1998, Buena Vista University

Teaching and Research Interests

• American West
• Global Midwest
• Borderlands
• Comparative frontiers

Work in Progress

Dr. Offenburger is currently researching the history of the American road trip genre, as well as the history of Storm Lake, Iowa.

He enjoys advising and working with students who have interests in the American West, frontier zones, Native American history, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands.  Students with a particular interest in the Midwest, the Old Northwest, Ohio, or Southern Africa history are also encouraged to contact Dr. Offenburger.

Courses Taught

• HST 244 Raiders of the Lost Archive
• HST 312 The American West
• HST 450 Researching Midwestern History

Selected Publications

• “Fall of the House of Keller: ‘Empire’ and Revolution in Baja California, 1910-1940,” Pacific Historical Review (2022)
• The Aimless Life: Music, Mines, and Revolution from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico (Nebraska Press, 2021)
• Frontiers in the Gilded Age: Adventure, Capitalism, and Dispossession from Southern Africa to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-1917 (Yale Press, 2019)
• “U.S. Expansion and the Creation of the ‘Middle West’ in the Nineteenth Century,” in Jon K. Lauck, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Midwestern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press) (forthcoming [2021])
• “Millenarianism in Iowa and the Eastern Cape: Thinking through Field of Dreams and the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement,” English Studies in Africa 61, no. 1 (2018)
• "Outlanders and Inlanders: Boer Immigration to the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1902-1905" in Brian Cannon and Jessie Embry, eds., Immigrants in the Far West: Historical Identities and Experiences, University of Utah Press, 2015
• "Cultural Imperialism and the Romanticized Frontier: From South Africa and Great Britain to New Mexico's Mesilla Valley," Amerikastudien / American Studies 59, no. 4, 2014
• "When the West Turned South: Making Home Lands in Revolutionary Sonora," Western Historical Quarterly 45, no. 3, 2014
• "The Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement in History and Literature," History Compass 7, no. 6, 2009
• "Duplicity and Plagiarism in Zakes Mda's Heart of Redness," Research in African Literatures 39, no. 3, 2008
• "Smallpox and Epidemic Threat in Nineteenth-Century Xhosaland," African Studies 67, no. 2, 2008

Selected Grants and Awards

• Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Media History (2020) 
• Finalist, David J. Weber Book Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies (2020)
• Frederick W. Beinecke Prize for an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the field of Western American History, Yale University, 2014.
• Bert M. Fireman Award, Western History Association, for the best student article published in the Western Historical Quarterly each year, as judged by the editors of the WHQ, 2014