Ben Cater, Ph.D.

Dr. Ben Cater possesses undergraduate and graduate training in U.S. History and Literature as well as in Latin American Studies.  He completed his M.A. degree at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he studied the religious history of the American West through a generous grant from the A.B. Hammond Fellowship for Western American Studies. At the University of Utah, where he completed his Ph.D., he received the Floyd O'Neill Scholarship in Western American Studies to study the religious and socioeconomic effects of the health industry of Progressive Era Salt Lake City. His research has appeared in several journals, including then Utah Historical Quarterly, which awarded him the 2011 Nick Yengich Memorial Editor's Choice Award and the Dale L. Morgan Award in both 2015 and 2017. 

Currently, his research examines the history of surfing and surf culture in relation to evolving ideas about health, sport, and the body during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He recently published "Surfing Together, Surfing Alone: Surf Tribes and Tribalism in Southern California during the Twentieth Century" in G. James Daichendt, Tribal and the Cultural Legacy of Streetwear (2024) and is a script consultant for "One Long Ride," a feature length documentary "chronicling the iconic Surf and Skateboarding company that Larry Gordon and Floyd Smith founded in San Diego, California, in 1959." He is also writing an article on the transition from ancient to modern understandings of wave riding in Hawai'i from the end of the kapu system to rise of Waikiki's tourist industry in the early twentieth century.  Dr. Cater teaches lower and upper division courses in History and Environmental Studies, and serves as a professor and director of the PLNU Honors Program.