Current Semester
Spring 2013 Courses:
HSTA 468 - History of Yellowstone (online)
Office Hours: By appointment only
Office: Wilson 2-163
Email: daniel.zizzamia@msu.montana.edu
Research Interests
Environmental History
History of Science
History of Technology
Research Statement
My current research uses the Western Interior Seaway (WIS), a maritime paleoenvironment organizing geography to address the historical geography of the American West between 1860 and 1980, from influential paleontological discoveries and geologic resource-based and coal related settlement patterns to controversial coal strip-mining practices and commercial fossil hunting. In this geography, paleontologists, railroad workers, coal miners, Native Americans and agriculturalists constitute a community impacted by the ecologies and processes of geologic time, which in turn impacted socio-cultural matrices and environmental transformations from the late nineteenth-century to today.
Awards, Honors, and Affiliations
Best Doctoral Paper, Montana State University History Department, 2012
Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, Montana State University College of Letters and Sciences, 2010.
Outstanding PhD Teaching Assistant Montana State University Department of History and Philosophy, 2010.
Conference Papers
Zizzamia, Daniel (2010), “Mining a Shallow Sea of Deep Time: Fossils and Fossil Fuels in the Western Interior Seaway,” Paper presented at the North American Society for Oceanic History Conference in Mystic, CT.
Zizzamia, Daniel (2010), “Imaginings and Socio-Cultural Interactions in the Western Interior Seaway,” Paper presented at the Network in Canadian History and the Environment Place and Placelessness Virtual Environmental History Conference for Graduate Students.
Zizzamia, Daniel (2011), “‘we are still living in the Cretaceous epoch’: The Ties of Deep Time: Marine Fossils and Fossil Fuels in the American West,” Paper Presented at the Columbia History of Science Group Annual Conference in Friday Harbor, WA.
Zizzamia, Daniel (2011), “Settling a Shallow Sea of Deep Time: Fossils, Coal, and Industry in the Western Interior Seaway,” Paper Presented at the American Society for Environmental History Conference in Phoenix, AZ.
