2010 Distinguished Alumni Award: Virginia DeJohn Anderson

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is a professor of early American history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she has taught since 1985. Her area of specialization is the history of Colonial and Revolutionary America. Her latest book, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, received the Phi Alpha Theta Best Subsequent Book Award in 2005. Creatures of Empire combines ethnohistorical and environmental history approaches to examine the impact of imported livestock on Anglo-Indian relations in the North American colonies.

More recently, her new book project, The Martyr and the Traitor: Taking Sides in the American Revolution, explores the personal as well as political transformations that shaped individual lives in unexpected ways as the Revolutionary crisis unfolded. She is also co-author of a U.S. history textbook, The American Journey: A History of the United States, published by Prentice Hall, Inc. and now in its fifth edition. Throughout her career, Dr. DeJohn Anderson has received numerous grants and fellowships and has been recognized with multiple honors, including the Outstanding Graduate Advisor Award at the University of Colorado in 2006 and the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship, 2009-2012.

Professor DeJohn Anderson earned her B.A. degree from the University of Connecticut in 1976, graduating summa cum laude as a University Scholar. She completed an M.A. degree at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England as a Marshall Scholar from 1976-1978, and finished her graduate study at Harvard University with an A.M. degree and Ph.D. in 1984.