William Bauer is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. He grew up on northern California’s Round Valley Reservation and earned his undergraduate degree in American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame. Bauer received his Ph.D. in History at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied with former Western History Association President Albert Hurtado. Before arriving at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Bauer taught at the University of Wyoming. He has offered classes on American Indian history, the history of the American Southwest, the history of Indian gaming, sports history and museums. Bauer has held postdoctoral and visiting scholar appointments at Stanford University, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Los Angeles.

Bauer has been an active member of the WHA since receiving an Indian Student Scholarship and the Sara Jackson Award at the 1999 WHA meeting in Portland. He has served on the WHA Nominating Committee and Council as well as two Program Committees and the Robert Athearn, Donald Fixico and Arrell Gibson award committees. He has also served on the council of the American Society of Ethnohistory and has been a member of the American Historical Association’s Committee on Minority Historians and the Organization of American Historian’s African American, Latino, Asian American and Native American (ALANA) Historians and Histories committee.

Bauer’s research examines the history of Indigenous People, labor and oral history in California and the American West. He is the author of the John C. Ewers award winning We Are the Land: A Native History of California, co-written with Damon Akins (University of California Press, 2021), California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (University of Washington Press, 2016) and “We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here”: Work, Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). In addition to working on oral history projects with the Round Valley Indian community, Bauer has worked for the Tolowa Nation of northwestern California.