My Story
David Wishart is a professor of geography in the geography/GIScience faculty in the School of Natural Resources. He teaches Introduction to Human Geography, Historical Geography of the Great Plains, History and Philosophy of Geography, Senior Seminar, and graduate seminars in historical Geography and in the Great Plains region.
Wishart's particular interest is in historical geography, especially in the regional context of the Great Plains and in the dispossession of indigenous peoples and their more recent claims cases. He is also interested in the epistemology of geography and History, especially the question: what can be known about the past?
Most recently, he is a co-author of The Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He has been the chief undergraduate advisor since 1974, and he chaired the Department of Anthropology and Geography from 2002 to 2008. Wishart was asked to present the Chancellor's Distinguished Lecture in fall of 2004. He received the J.B. Jackson Prize in 1995 for the Best Scholarly Book in North American Human Geography for his book, An Unspeakable Sadness: The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians. He also edited the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, which was released in 2004, and the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains Indians (2006).