NEH Workshops Faculty - Heart Mountain

Read about this year’s faculty:

Dr. Hall is a retired professor of Psychology in the clinical psychology program at the University of Oregon.His paternal grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from England and his maternal grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Japan in the early 1900s. His mother and her family were incarcerated at Poston, Arizona during World War II because they were Japanese Americans. His research interests are in culture and mental health with a particular interest in Asian Americans.

Portrait of Dr. Cally Steussy with Heart Mountain in the background

Dr. Steussy is Heart Mountain’s Director of Interpretation & Preservation. She recently completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at Indiana University. Her dissertation, about Heart Mountain, is titled Takamine o se ni: Assessing relationships to the Wyoming landscape during the World War II Nikkei Incarceration through Material Cultural and Literature.

A former child incarceree at Heart Mountain who became a scientist for Boeing, Mihara now speaks worldwide about the incarceration. He received the Paul A. Gagnon Prize from the National Council on History Education in 2018.

A history professor at Northwest College, McKinney is an expert in Wyoming history and life at Heart Mountain and has also taught high school history in Wyoming. She is the descendant of a Montana Homesteader.

A member of the American and Diaspora Studies faculty at the University of Wyoming, Keller examines the relationship of religious lives to struggles for meaning and power, and a co-organizer of the Apsáalooke’s Return to Foretop’s Father pipe ceremony and ascent.

Aoyama is a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, a researcher at the HMWF, and a Heart Mountain descendant. She studies the experience of Japanese Americans within a broader context of American racial studies, examined through the lens of solidarity history.

Abe is the lead author of a new graphic novel, We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration. He won an American Book Award for JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy, and made an award-winning PBS documentary, Conscience and the Constitution.

Dr. Sandeen is the longtime director of the University of Wyoming’s American Studies program; he studies American cultural landscapes, including a survey of the contemporary landscape surrounding the Heart Mountain camp. He is also the backup project director.

The Heart Mountain, Wyoming and the Japanese American Incarceration 2024 Workshop has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.