Ray Rast

Born and raised near Kansas City, Missouri, Dr. Ray Rast has studied and taught U.S. history across the country. He earned his B.A. in History from Yale University in 1995, his M.A. in History from the University of New Mexico in 1998, and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Washington in 2006. Dr. Rast held a visiting position at the College of Wooster in Ohio and then served as an assistant professor for five years at California State University, Fullerton, before coming to Gonzaga in 2012.

Dr. Rast specializes in U.S. history since the Civil War, American cultural history, American urban history, the history of the American West (including the Pacific Northwest), and Latina/o history (particularly Mexican American history). His dissertation examined the relationship between the development of the tourism industry in San Francisco and the transformation in American culture from the Victorian to the Modern between the 1860s and the 1920s. More broadly, his scholarship focuses on tourism, mobility, social and cultural diversity, historic preservation, and “sense of place” in the modern American West.

Dr. Rast also teaches and engages in “public history” (the work that historians do beyond the university). He has written several National Register and National Historic Landmark nominations and curated or consulted on several museum exhibitions, including an award-winning exhibition on the legal battle to abolish segregated “Mexican schools” in post-WWII California (a class action lawsuit known as Mendez, et al. v. Westminster School District, et al.).

Along the same lines, Dr. Rast has worked directly with the National Park Service in various consulting roles. He served as the lead historian for the Park Service’s Cesar Chavez Special Resource Study from 2010 to 2012, he served on the National Park System Advisory Board’s Planning Committee from 2010 to 2014, and in 2011 Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar appointed him to a scholars’ advisory board for the National Park Service’s “American Latino Heritage Initiative.” Dr. Rast’s work on the Chavez Special Resource Study played an important role in President Obama’s creation of the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in 2012.