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Rapid City, SDDate Appointed
Eric Zimmer is a historian from the Black Hills of South Dakota and is the director of philanthropy at the Black Hills Area Community Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. In 2022 and 2023, he was the A.B. Hammond Visiting Assistant Professor of Western United States History at the University of Montana, where he completed his most recent book, Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement (University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).
Before his time in Montana, Zimmer spent six years as a senior historian at the consulting firm Vantage Point Historical Services, Inc., where he worked on a variety of narrative, digital, oral, and exhibit-based history projects for clients across the United States. From 2015 to 2023, he was a volunteer historian for the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project, an Indigenous-led community research initiative in his home town of Rapid City.
Zimmer’s scholarship and the collaborative projects with which he is affiliated have received high honors from the Western History Association, the Midwestern History Association, the National Council on Public History, the American Society for Environmental History, the American Association for State and Local History, and more. He has served as the primary grant author or co-PI on several projects, securing funding support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Windrose Fund, Monument Lab, the American Philosophical Society, the American Historical Association, the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Indian Country Today Media Network, and in several scholarly journals.