Our Staff

Daniel Grant is the Director of the Ivan Doig Center and teaches history at Montana State University. He is a historian, geographer, writer, and publicly engaged educator focused primarily on the lands and peoples of the North American West. At the Doig Center, he convenes dialogue on pressing issues and across boundaries, facilitates public-facing research, teaching, and creative work, and builds partnerships across MSU, Montana, and the West. He has previously held various teaching, research, and administrative appointments, including at MSU, Harvard University, and Middlebury College. His writing has appeared in a range of scholarly and popular venues, and he is completing his first book, No Man's Land: Unsettled Ground in the American West. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, much of his adult life has been rooted in the Intermountain West and Midwest. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. from Whitman College. 

Anna Verhaeghe graduated from Montana State in 2019 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. After, skiing, soul searching, and some work too, she found herself back at Montana State excited to support the mission of the Ivan Doig Center. She has a profound love of the North American West as a place and an idea. Anna continuously applies an interdisciplinary lens to her work and studies, often finding herself at the crossroads of science, people, and place. As a graduate student in the Montana State Earth Science program, she studies the impacts of wildfire on snow hydrology. In her precious and sparse free time, she enjoys, skiing, backpacking, days on the river, and cuddling with her dogs Rook and Arlo. 

Riley Petersen is a Junior at Montana State University studying History with a minor in Sociology and an emphasis in Criminology. Growing up in Utah, her academic interests include the American West, environmental history, and the ways in which storytelling shapes a collective memory and a sense of place. Outside of academics, Riley enjoys spending as much time outdoors as possible; she is an avid snowboarder, hiker, and rock climber who has spent plenty of time in the landscapes central to Ivan Doig’s writing. Riley also volunteers with the Best Defense Foundation, assisting World War II veterans and documenting their stories through storytelling, photography, and social media. Similar to Ivan Doig's focus on everyday lives and lived experience in the American West, Riley approaches history as something carried by people and preserved through attention, record, and care.