Alison Fields is the Director of the OU School of Visual Arts. She is the Mary Lou Milner Carver Professor of Art of the American West, Professor of Art History. Fields received a B.A. in English and Native American Studies from Colgate University, an M.A. in American Civilization from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. At OU, she teaches courses in visual culture, western cinema, public memory, and museum studies. She has also taught in other OU programs including Women’s and Gender Studies, Film and Media Studies, Museum Studies, and Art and Technology.
In Spring 2026, her book Lone Star, was published as part of the University of New Mexico Press’s “Reel West” series. Fields is also co-editor, with Elyssa Faison of Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism Across the Pacific (University of Washington Press, 2024), author of Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and is co-author, with Todd Stewart, of Picher, Oklahoma: Catastrophe, Memory, and Trauma (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). Her public history book, Chickasaw Women Artisans (Chickasaw Press, 2016), won the Independent Book Publishers’ Independent Spirit Award in 2017. Next, in 2027, the Syracuse University Press will publish Beyond Believing: New Scholarship in UFO Studies, a volume she co-edited with William Dewan and Dan Wojcik. Additional upcoming projects will address contemporary memorialization and atomic photography. She also has published many peer-reviewed journal articles, including articles in American Studies, American Indian Quarterly, The Public Historian, Journal of Genocide Research, Religions, The Journal of Arizona History, and Comparative American Studies.
