Philip J. Roberts (Ph.D., University of Washington) - Wyoming History, American West, Public History, Legal History

Brief Bio: Phil Roberts

Phil Roberts is associate professor of history, University of Wyoming, where he has been on the faculty since 1990.

He is a native of Lusk, Niobrara County, Wyoming, and lived during his early years on a ranch homesteaded by his grandfather.  He attended public schools in Lusk, Torrington, Thermopolis, Worland, and numerous other towns around the West. He graduated from Cody (Wyo.) High School in 1966.  After 1 ½ years at Northwest College, Powell, he entered the University of Wyoming.  He served in the U. S. Marine Corps from 1969-1972 and, the next year, returned to Wyoming to complete his undergraduate degree at the University of Wyoming.  After editing newspapers in California and Arizona, he again returned to Wyoming for a law degree.

 A 1977 graduate of the University of Wyoming College of Law, he practiced law, worked in public history, owned a publishing company, and published a city magazine in Cheyenne. In the middle 1980s, he entered the University of Washington, Seattle, for a doctorate in history. He was granted the Ph.D. in history in 1990, and later that year, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Wyoming where he has taught the history of Wyoming and the West, legal, public and environmental history. 

            At three different times in his career, he has served as editor of Annals of Wyoming, and he currently serves in that capacity. His dissertation on taxation in Washington Territory (State) was published by the University of Washington Press. He recently completed a manuscript on Prohibition in Wyoming.  He is co-author (with his two brothers) of Wyoming Almanac, now in its fifth edition.

Other recent history articles include: “Wyoming’s Pioneers of Prohibition,” Wyoming Law Review, Summer, 2001; “Scotts Bluff National Monument and the Coming of Television to the Nebraska Panhandle,” Nebraska History, Spring, 1996; and "The Prohibition Agency's First Case," Western Legal History, Summer/Fall, 1998. 

He is currently at work on a comparative analysis of oil development in the American West and the Arab Middle East. In recent years, he conducted research and served as a visiting lecturer at two universities in the Middle East. He is also completing work on an article on “delisting” of national monuments for which he received a University of Wyoming Arts and Sciences research grant.

He is a member of several professional and civic organizations including: the Wyoming State Bar (admitted to practice in 1977); the Wyoming State Historical Society; Western History Association; American Historical Association; Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society; and the Pacific Northwest Historians’ Guild. 

His wife Peggy served as chair of the Journalism and Mass Communication Department, American University in Cairo, Egypt, from 2000-2002, where she remains on the faculty.