His two books thus far have explored American tales of wolves, bears, mountain men and the truths behind myths.

Now, University of Notre Dame History Professor has been awarded a fellowship to work on an environmental history of movement in America before the widespread use of automobiles and airplanes.

“I’m interested in how travel and migration interacted with other natural movements like seasonal cycles of plant growth — such as grass to feed beasts of burden — and hydrological and weather cycles that influenced river flows and wind patterns for sailing,” Coleman says.

He plans to use his fellowship to conduct research for a book that will focus on the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, or roughly 1783 to 1860.

Coleman’s first book, “Vicious: Wolves and Men in America” (Yale University Press, 2004), won the American Historical Association’s 2005 John H. Dunning Prize and the Western History Association’s 2005 W. Turrentine Jackson Award.

In 2012, he published “Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, A Bear and the Rise of the American Nation” (Hill and Wang). The book examines the story and times of Glass, who in 1823 was left for dead in the wilderness of South Dakota after being mauled by a bear, only to crawl back to civilization.

Glass vowed revenge on those who abandoned him — a revenge that never happened. Instead, his legend grew to be recalled as an ultimate wilderness adventure that Coleman says still resonates.

“Like my other books, this new one will deal with animals a lot,” he says. “But I want to integrate animals into larger natural histories of grass, water and wind.”

The historian’s environmental work is also not just about the past, he notes. “I definitely want this project to get people thinking about how they move today.”

Coleman is currently working with colleagues John Mack Faragher and Robert Hine to complete the revised edition of a textbook called “The American West: A New Interpretive History” (Yale University Press).

“I hope to finish my updating and revisions over the next couple months, then I’ll turn it over to John. While he has the manuscript, I will get going on the movement project.”

The Guggenheim, Coleman says, “gives me the amazing opportunity to focus all my time over the next year on this project, and I will be traveling to archives across the country to gather material.”

Coleman is the second Notre Dame historian in as many years to receive Guggenheim funding. , professor of history and director of the College of Arts and Letters’ , was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012 for her book project “Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval Spain.”

Originally published by Mike Danahey at on June 7, 2013.

, director of the University of Notre Dame’s , recently was named winner of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for his manuscript “Fetish,” which will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Founded in 1927, is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“Menes is an accomplished poet who has managed to evolve a language that seems determined to encapsulate the broadest and most compelling notion of America that embraces both the northern and southern continents,” Prairie Schooner editor Kwame Dawes says. “His poems reveal a formal dexterity that is awe-inspiring, and his poems are rich with delight and full fascination with the human experience.

“His is a bold and inventive imagination. Our readers, we believe, will share our enthusiasm for ‘Fetish.’"

Menes says his new book both extends and recasts the themes of displacement and assimilation he began to explore in “Furia,” a previous collection published by Milkweed in 2005.

“Diaspora has defined my family in complex and contradictory ways for more than five generations,” he says, “beginning with our exile experience in Miami and my upbringing in Perú, then reaching back to ancestors who emigrated to Cuba in the 19th century.”

Menes has lived most of his life in the United States and since 2000 has been teaching in Notre Dame’s , where he is an associate professor in the and a fellow in the — but his past is present in his upcoming volume of poetry.

“These are poems, whether in free verse or in traditional forms, that sew together stories of dislocation and loss, oppression and poverty, threadings of survival and hope, lives of work and faith seamed into a reverent wholeness I call the Américan tapestry, by which I mean all the Americas,” Menes says. “They immerse themselves in the cultures and histories of these varied places — including South Bend, Ind., where I have found a sense of rootedness as a university professor and, more importantly, as a father.”

Menes notes that fatherhood is another essential element of “Fetish,” and one he explores primarily through sonnet form. Poems such as “Ars Poetica,” for example, focus on the craft of upholstery, Menes’s father’s primary occupation, which the author says has influenced his own poetics.

“Other sonnets, such as ‘Tantrums,’” Menes says, “delve into my own relationship as a father to my American-born son as well as to my adoptive daughter (born in Panama), a beautiful, bright child who suffers from behavioral disorders. As her father but also as a poet, I sense an enduring obligation to tell her story.”

Yet other verses express the multicultural experience, be it Cubans struggling with poverty in “Courtyard of Clotheslines” or the mixing of Yoruban and Christian symbolism in the titular poem or the memories Menes recalls in “Television, a Patient Teacher” of watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and other 1960s shows to perfect his American English.

In addition to “Fetish” and “Furia,” Menes is author of “Rumba atop the Stones” (Peepal Tree), and his poems have appeared in magazines and journals such as The Alaska Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, Callaloo, The Hudson Review, Image, Indiana Review, Shenandoah and Ploughshares, as well as Prairie Schooner.

Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of Spanish poetry, including “My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni” (Latin American Literary Review Press).

He also serves as editor of “Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred” (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe) and “The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame Press, 1991-2008” (University of Notre Dame Press).

Menes’s honors include a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009 and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award in 2001.

Of wining his most recent award, Menes says simply, “It is a privilege.”

Originally published by Mike Danahey at on Aug. 13, 2012.

, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, is interested in the truths that hide in lies.

In his new book, “,” the historian uses a whopper of a story to explore not how the West was won but how its image was built.

Mountain man Hugh Glass’ lingering lore begins in the wilds of South Dakota, where a grizzly bear mauls him in 1823.

According to the story, the party Glass traveled with killed the bear, but Glass had been mortally wounded. The expedition leader told two men to stay behind to bury Glass if he died or, should he recover, to lead him back to civilization.

But the duo skipped out early, taking Glass’ gear with them. Barely able to walk or fend for himself, Glass crawled back to the trading post at Fort Kiowa, hundreds of miles away, vowing a revenge that never came to pass.

Of all the tall tales told from that era, Coleman, a faculty member in the College of Arts and Letters’ , says he was drawn to this one in particular because of the role nature plays in the plot.

“Glass struggled with nature instead of other human beings. I thought he could bridge the mythic West and environmental history.”

He explains, “I’m trying to show how working people like Glass helped Americans define their nation as different and exceptional. They wanted the nation to sprout from the soil and to be ingrained in people. This naturalizing process, however, wasn’t pleasant. People close to nature — working people — suffered.

“Nationalists ‘kidnapped’ working people as symbols, while they tried to distance their own bodies from toil and violence. The kicker is that this process of cultural appropriation gave marginal people like Glass some influence on the national character. If you read the stories a certain way,” Coleman says, “I think you can see them messing with their audience.”

At the same time, far from accepting such tales as gospel, readers in Glass’ day questioned all these stories.

“The mountain men were seen as shifty liars even as people celebrated them as environmental Americans,” Coleman says. “That’s how cultural appropriation worked. They needed men like Glass to establish American exceptionalism, but they also wanted to quarantine them on the frontier. No one wanted Glass to come back.”

Glass’ epic crawl, he adds, was part of the growing pre-Mark Twain tradition of tales concerning con artists and tricksters that some also saw as integral to the concept of the West, with Glass’ experience an ultimate wilderness adventure that still resonates today.

“Survivalism has become rampant since the 1970s, and that’s why Glass is still around. Americans still seem interested in working people’s struggles against nature — like ‘Deadliest Catch’ (the ‘reality’ TV show about Alaskan crab fishermen). The difference is that today,” Coleman says, “Glass is held up as a role model. He has become a life coach for the end times.”

With little actually known for sure about Glass, Coleman says his book is more a missing person report than a biography.

“The main challenge of the research and writing was the fact that Hugh Glass left almost nothing behind. The book had to be about the stuff around him, his social, environmental and cultural surroundings. It would have been much easier to have a personal archive I could park myself in for an extended period — but then it would have been a far less interesting book to write.”

To research the mythic story of Glass, Coleman traveled to the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis to pore over materials related to the western fur trade. He also spent time in the Western collections of the Newberry in Chicago. “Many documents involving the American fur trade had been published over the years, and I tried to reread famous fur trade accounts like James Beckwourth’s autobiography and George Ruxton’s ‘Life in the Far West’ with new eyes.”

Coleman notes that “in general, I was surprised most by the material people have known about for a long time — the published mountain man memoirs. Historians have read them for reality of the West, the details of the fur trade and such, but I was overtaken by the leaps of fancy and outright lies contained in them. I’m very interested in lies.”

Along with the legacy of such lies, Coleman’s work is informed by pop culture across eras, from writers in the 1800s looking to make a buck off their versions of the West — including Herman Melville — to references to Homer Simpson, Woody Allen’s “Zelig” and the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski.”

“Glass was a pop-culture creation from the start,” Coleman says. “That’s why we know about him at all. So it seemed essential to trace his journey through popular culture as well as the wilderness. Like Glass, I swim in pop culture, and since I write a self-reflective type of history, this comes out.”

The approach has meant he has not had problems getting his books into print. “Publishers, I think, see my unconventional style as an asset.”

The content also resonates with modern readers: Both of his books, Coleman says, “play with the relationships of social, cultural and environmental history — and they have a good deal of blood and violence.”

Coleman says he signed a contract for his first book before he had even finished the dissertation. That book, “” (Yale University Press, 2004), won the American Historical Association’s 2005 John H. Dunning Prize and the Western History Association’s 2005 W. Turrentine Jackson Award.

His next project is a textbook, “The American West: A New Interpretive History (Revised Edition)” with John Mack Faragher and Robert Hine.

Coleman’s research and teaching at Notre Dame focus on early American history and the American West. He is also on the faculty of the University’s .

In spring 2012, he taught an undergraduate course on the American West and a graduate seminar on environmental history and received a Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Coleman says he frequently talks about his writing in the classroom.

“I use parts of the books as examples of how I write,” he says. “The actual topics come up less often, but I do bring up wolves, bears and mountain men every so often.”

Originally published by Mike Danahey at on May 23, 2012.