Philadelphia native David Fenimore almost followed his father and
grandfather into the profession of chemical engineering, but
changed majors after enduring three years of courses like thermodynamics and
"O-Chem." He graduated in English from the University
of Pennsylvania, where he studied writing with John Edgar Wideman and
directed programming for campus radio station WXPN. After an extended
wanderjahr, he earned his MA in English here at Nevada while teaching,
administering and advising Sierra Nevada College students a few miles from
his North Lake Tahoe home.
Currently a continuing academic non-tenure-track lecturer in the Department of English, and, recently the 2001-2003 University Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, he teaches extensively in the University’s Core Humanities program as well as in English, where he teaches sophomore requirements for the major and also offers popular capstone courses such as “American Storytelling” and “Language, Science & Society.” He also serves as one of the department's principal undergraduate advisors, produces its sporadic newsletters and serves on numerous committees at both the departmental and university level.
Fenimore’s favorite course, Core Humanities 201 (the former WT 201), explores the ways that value systems are encoded in the three major world monotheisms. The course features a two-week unit on ancient Islam, which he studied in detail for a Fall 1998 faculty development project. His version of CH 202, the modern European course, compares outlines of the scientific revolution and the Protestant Reformation, reading Bacon, Darwin, Marx, Dickens, Freud, and others to trace the growing dominance of materialism. In both these courses as well as CH 203, the American course, he makes frequent use of visual art and music as cultural reflections of the dominant ideas of the ages and their often marginalized dissenting voices and values. In the honors versions of these courses, as well as in his capstone courses, he directs students in readers' theater versions of plays such as Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. He received the Inter-Fraternity Council's "Teacher of the Year" in 1996, and in 2003 was nominated for the Alan Bible Teaching Award.
His reviews and articles on Western writers and landscapes have been published in journals such as ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & the Environment, Western American Literature, and Halcyon. His two-act play A Bad Boy Grown Up: The Life and Times of Zane Grey premiered in 1995 at the Capitol Theatre in Truckee, California, and was inspired by his first experience as a Chautauquan. Under the auspices of the Nevada Humanities Committee and the direction of Chautauqua pioneer Clay “Thomas Jefferson" Jenkinson, Fenimore researched and assembled a first-person scholarly monologue by Western writer Zane Grey, which debuted earlier that same year at the Great Basin Chautauqua in Reno. Subsequent roles – as New York newspaperman Horace Greeley, California settler John A. Sutter, Woody Guthrie, and Lewis Keseberg, last-rescued survivor of the Donner Party – have taken him on the road from Truckee Elementary School to museums, parks, libraries, schools and universities in Glen Falls, New York; Wickenberg, Arizona; Port Angeles, Washington; Greeley. Colorado; Riverside, California; and other far-flung outposts of the humanities. As well as working with state humanities organizations as project humanist, directing Chautauquas in California, New Hampshire and elsewhere, Fenimore has become involved in the Young Chautauqua movement, working with colleagues like the NEH award-winning Susan Tchudi to train K-12 teachers and students in the discipline of bringing historical characters to meaningful and instructive life in the classroom.
His spare time is devoted as much as possible to his teenage daughter, his friends, his bicycle and his cross-country skis. In 1986 he pedaled a bicycle across the US, taking three months to travel from Oceanside, California to Bar Harbor, Maine. This exploit generated Bicycling Across America (Pinedrop Press, 1989) for which, to the author’s knowledge, the film options are still available.
- More information at Fenimore's home page.
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