Eric Zimmer is a historian from the Black Hills of South Dakota. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is currently pursuing a certificate in nonprofit leadership through the Harvard Kennedy School’s executive education program. Zimmer serves as the Vice President of Philanthropy and Special Projects at the Black Hills Area Community Foundation. There, he works with a wonderfully talented team to drive strategic philanthropy across his home region and help make the Black Hills thrive, forever.

From 2022 to 2023, Zimmer was the A.B. Hammond Visiting Assistant Professor of Western United States History at the University of Montana. There, he completed his most recent book, Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement, which is available from the University of Oklahoma Press. This project has won numerous awards, including the Hal K. Rothman Prize from the Western History Association, the Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award from the State Historical Society of Iowa, and the Rachel Carson Prize from the American Society for Environmental History. The book explores the remarkable story of the Meskwaki Nation, a Native American tribe in Iowa that bought back some of its homeland in 1857. The Meskwaki story offers context and insight for anyone interested in the modern movement to reclaim Indigenous lands in the US and elsewhere.

Prior to his time in Montana, Zimmer spent six years as a senior historian at the consulting firm Vantage Point Historical Services, Inc., where he worked on a variety of narrative, digital, oral, and exhibit-based history projects for clients across the United States. From 2015 to 2023, he was a volunteer historian for the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project, an Indigenous-led community research initiative in his home town of Rapid City, South Dakota.

Zimmer’s scholarship and the collaborative projects with which he is affiliated have received high honors from the Western History Association, the Midwestern History Association, the National Council on Public History, the American Society for Environmental History, the American Association for State and Local History, and more. He has served as the primary grant author or co-PI on several projects, securing tens of millions of dollars in funding support from donors to the BHACF as well as grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Windrose Fund, Monument Lab, the American Philosophical Society, the American Historical Association, the State Historical Society of Iowa, the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa, and more. He has been quoted in Smithsonian Magazine and other publications; and his work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Indian Country Today Media Network, as well as several scholarly journals.

He can be reached at ericszimmer@gmail.com.