Occidental College and the Huntington Library co-founded the Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professorship in United States History. The Billington Visiting Professorship has brought some of the country's leading historians to Occidental.
With funding made possible by the estate of historian Ray Allen Billington and supplemented by a grant from the Times Mirror Foundation, the professorship honors the tradition of fine teacher/scholars at American liberal arts colleges.
This innovative professorship is a fitting legacy for Billington. A leader in the scholarly community, he served as president of the American Studies Association, the Western History Association, and the Organization of American Historians.
He was a superb historian whose scholarly books covered such varied fields as racism, ethnocentrism, biography, and western history. At the Huntington, where he was a senior research associate from 1963 until his death in 1981, he made highly effective use of the Frederick Jackson Turner papers to produce Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher, which won the coveted Bancroft Prize.
Billington also had strong ties to liberal arts colleges. He taught at Smith College from 1937-1944, and in the 1970s served as trustee at Occidental, which he described as “my favorite college of all the West, one that I have more or less adopted in my own mind as the institution here with which I would most like to be associated."
2024-2025 Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor: Andrew Isenberg, University of Kansas
Andrew Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is an American historian with wide-ranging interests that include environmental history, borderlands, Indigenous history, the American West, the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of slavery.
He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of nine books, including The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850 (2025); Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life (2013); Mining California: An Ecological History (2005); and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (2000, 2020).
His current research explores late eighteenth-century anti-federalist politics and the public memory of militia service in the early American republic. He has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich.
Past Billington Awardees
2024-2025 | Damon Akins, Guilford College
2022-2023 | Thomas J. Balcerski, Eastern Connecticut State University
2020-2021 | Leslie Butler, Dartmouth College
2018-2019 | Michael Vorenberg, Brown University
2016-2017 | Bethel Saler, Haverford College
2014-2015 | Frank Guridy, The University of Texas at Austin
2012-2013 | Casey Blake, Columbia University
2010-2011 | Daniel Horowitz, Smith College
2008-2009 | Jared Orsi, Colorado State University
2006-2007 | Jonathan Earle, University of Kansas
2004-2005 | Douglas Monroy, Colorado College
2002-2003 | Matt Gallman, University of Florida
2001-2002 | Sharon Ullman, Bryn Mawr College
2000-2001 | Victoria Bissell Brown, Grinnell College
1999-2000 | Richard Buel, Wesleyan University
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