Patricia Nelson Limerick

Patricia Nelson Limerick (born May 17, 1951) is an American historian, author, lecturer and teacher, considered to be one of the leading historians of the American West.

Limerick is the daughter of Grant and Patricia Nelson and was born and raised in Banning, California. She received a B.A. in American studies in 1972 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in American studies in 1980 at Yale University.

She was an assistant professor of history at Harvard University from 1980 to 1984. Previously she taught at Yale as a graduate teaching assistant, where she helped teach the highly regarded 'daily themes' class. Since then Limerick has been at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is professor of history and chair of the Board of the Center of the American West.

Limerick was president of the Organization of American Historians (2014) and is a former president of the American Studies Association (1996–1997) and the Western History Association (2000). She is known for her 1987 book The Legacy of Conquest, which is part of a body of historical writing sometimes known as the New Western History. In 1995, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Her essay on the Modoc War, titled "Haunted America" appears in the collection Ways of Reading, a textbook widely used by undergraduate English students. She also co-edited a collection of essays, titled Trails: Toward a New Western History which relate to her 1989 "Trails Through Time" exhibit.

In January 2016 she was appointed the Colorado State Historian and served till August 2018.Also in January 2016, she was appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities advisory board, the National Council on the Humanities. Limerick was nominated by President Obama in Spring 2015 and was confirmed by the United States Senate in November 2015.

Academic

• — (1985). Desert passages : encounters with the American deserts. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0826307941.
• — (1987). The legacy of conquest : the unbroken past of the American West. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0393023909.
• —; Milner II, Clyde A.; Rankin, Charles E., eds. (1991). Trails : toward a new western history. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0700605019.
• — (2000). Something in the soil : legacies and reckonings in the New West. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 978-0393037883.
• —; Hanson, Jason L. (2012). A ditch in time : the city, the west, and water. Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Pub. ISBN 978-1-55591-366-3.

Op-eds

• Monthly column for the Denver Post (current)

• Alumni Achievement Award, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1990
• State Humanist of the Year, Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, 1992
• Official Fool of the University of Colorado, from 1987 to 2008
• MacArthur Fellow, 1995–2000
• Hazel Barnes Prize, University of Colorado's highest award for teaching and research, 2001

Limerick's first marriage was to architect Jeffrey Limerick, who died of a stroke in 2005. She married J. Houston Kempton in 2007.