Anne Coleman

Associate Professor of American Studies
Concurrent Associate Professor of History
American Studies

Research Interests

Relationships of representation and power in America since the 19th century as they intersect with environmental history and sports studies. How and why outdoor sports and ideas about Nature constructed as white. Sports as an arena for social change.

Related Courses Taught

AMST 30192 Sport and American Culture; AMST 30160 America in the 20th Century; AMST 30174 American Wilderness

Biography

Annie Gilbert Coleman is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on outdoor sports and recreation in the American West, and the relationships of culture and power that shape recreational spaces. Early publications include “The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing” (Pacific Historical Review, 1994), “From Snow Bunnies to Shred Betties” (in Scharff, ed., Seeing Nature Through Gender, 2003), and Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies (Kansas, 2004). More recent work includes “Shredding Mountain Lines: GoPro, Mobility, and the Spatial Politics of Outdoor Sports” (in Buckley and Youngs eds., The American Environment Revisited, 2018). Her second book, Quality Wilderness: A History of Professional Outdoor Guides and Their Labor, is under contract with Oxford University Press. It builds from “Rise of the House of Leisure: Outdoor Guides, Practical Knowledge, and Industrialization” (Western Historical Quarterly, 2011), and “River Rats in the Archive: Nature, Texts, and a Moving History of the Colorado” (in Shaffer and Young eds., Rendering Nature, 2015), to examine how professional guides have created American wilderness as a site of scenic adventure and sport.