Phil Roberts is associate professor of history, University of Wyoming Department of History, where he has been on the faculty since 1990.

He is a native of Lusk, Niobrara County, Wyoming. In his early years, he and his family lived on a ranch, homesteaded by his grandfather, in the Hat Creek community north of Lusk. He and his family lived in various Western states. In Wyoming, he attended public schools in Lusk, Torrington, Thermopolis, Worland, and Cody where he graduated from Cody (Wyo.) High School in 1966. He attended Northwest College, Powell, and then entered the University of Wyoming. He served in the U. S. Marine Corps from 1970-1972 and, the next year, returned to Wyoming to complete his undergraduate degree at the University of Wyoming. After editing a newspaper in Arizona, he again returned to Wyoming to attend law school.

A 1977 graduate of the University of Wyoming College of Law, he practiced law, worked in public history, owned a publishing company, and published a city magazine in Cheyenne. In the middle 1980s, he entered the University of Washington, Seattle, for a doctorate in history. He was granted the Ph.D. in history in 1990 and, later that year, he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Wyoming where he has taught the history of Wyoming and the West, legal, public and environmental history. He also taught courses in mass media law and a newly developed course titled "The History of Oil.".

Several times in his career, he has served as editor of Annals of Wyoming, concluding his third stint of eight years in that position in the fall of 2003. His publications include: A Penny for the Governor, A Dollar for Uncle Sam: Income Taxation in Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). He recently completed a manuscript on the elimination of a national monument (Shoshone Caverns National Monument, Wyoming).  He also has written extensively on Prohibition in Wyoming. He is co-author (with his two brothers) of Wyoming Almanac, now in its fifth edition. His edited compilation of history essays, many written by students in his graduate seminars and titled Readings in Wyoming History, is in its fourth edition (published in February 2004). His syndicated column, Buffalo Bones: Stories from Wyoming’s Past, ran in three dozen Wyoming newspapers in the 1980s. Selected columns were published in four paperback books published by the State of Wyoming. The original column was revived by the Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources Department, Cheyenne, and Phil continues to contribute an occasional article for the series.

Some recent history articles by Phil include: "A History of the Wyoming Sales Tax: How Lawmakers Chose It from Among Severance Taxes, an Income Tax, Gambling, and a Lottery," Wyoming Law Review 4 (2004), pp. 157-244; "Inside Federal Prohibition Enforcement in Wyoming: The Case of Bootlegging Busts in Northern Natrona County, 1928," Annals of Wyoming, Summer, 2002; "Wyoming’s Pioneers of Prohibition," Wyoming Law Review, Summer, 2001; "Scotts Bluff National Monument and the Coming of Television to the Nebraska Panhandle," Nebraska History, Spring, 1996; and "The Prohibition Agency's First Case," Western Legal History, Summer/Fall, 1998.

He is currently at work on a comparative analysis of oil development in the American West and the Arab Middle East. He conducted research and served as a visiting lecturer at two universities in the Middle East during the past decade. In the spring of 2004, he traveled to Baku, Azerbaijan, where he served as a consultant on legal education for the American Bar Association's CEELI program.

He is a member of several professional and civic organizations including: the Wyoming State Bar (admitted to practice in 1977); the Wyoming State Historical Society (life member); American Bar Association, Western History Association; American Historical Association; Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society; Tenth Judicial Circuit Historical Society, Fort Phil Kearny/Bozeman Trail Association; and the Pacific Northwest Historians’ Guild. He also served on the Albany County Historic Preservation Board (2001-2006). In 2004, he was appointed by the governor to the Wyoming Coin Advisory Committee, the group charged with helping develop a design for the Wyoming state quarter, minted in September 2007.. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Laramie Plains Museum. He was president of the Albany County Chapter, Wyoming State Historical Society, from 2000-2002. He also served on the founding board of Radio Montanesa, Laramie, and was elected to two terms as Albany County Democratic Party chairman. In 1998, he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wyoming.

At the University of Wyoming, he has served on the library advisory board, the Board of Faculty Advisors to the American Heritage Center, the Arts and Sciences College central committee (elected to a second three-year term in 2006), the University Committee on Committees, and the Student Publications Board (chairman, 2001-2004). In 2004 he was elected to a three-year term on the UW Graduate Council and served as council chair for two years. He is an adjunct professor with the American studies program and has served on the program’s advisory board.