Department of History

I am a scholar of United States history whose academic research focuses on questions regarding the interconnections among land policy, environmental change, and agricultural production.   

My current work explores the transformations of the North American grasslands from the Louisiana Purchase through the present.  Prairie Metamorphosis:  The Hidden History of Homesteading on the Great Plains, 1804-1976 decenters the underlying frame used by the nation-state as it established land policy, weaving a tapestry of interlocking environmental and social change through histories of native species, Indigenous and settler-colonial nations, and individual homesteaders.  By examining conflicts within the contact zone alongside the tumultuous phases of state formation from the first federal survey of the West to the present day, this project troubles the triumphant story of the long homestead era in the United States. Prairie Metamorphosis uses microhistorical methods for engaging landscape, biography, and environmental change, excavating the histories of three square-mile (640-acre) sections of the Great Plains, layering stories of transformation and weaving natural and human history into analysis of political and economic development. This project emphasizes the importance ofoften-invisible changes, probing archival silences about how environmental limits have mediatedsocial relations and how competition for resources often correlates with histories of discrimination, violence, and disorder.

My earlier books explore the transformation of the American landscape and the political and social implications of state action in US history.  Managing the Mountains:  Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia addresses the shifting ideas about land use planning and conservation policy during the early twentieth century,contextualizing the reform programs of the New Deal within broader political questions about submarginal land and social reform. The movement of federal policymakers into the Appalachian Mountains transformed the communities and ecosystems of these upcountry landscapes, resettled mountain people, and spawned the creation of new national parks and forests in the Eastern United States. The anthology American Georgics:  Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Landpulls together the best agrarian writing since the founding of the United States, followingagrarian thought as an interpretative thread through American narratives around farming and the nation.  This co-edited volume examines ideas about the place of agriculture through the central themes and tensions in agrarian thinking, providing a critical intervention in agricultural history, thereby charting the sweeping changes that have confronted agriculture and farm production as they have shaped American identity.

My academic commitments are motivated most broadly by an interest in the relationships between people and the land in public spaces and within landscapes of production.  My teaching interrogates the mechanisms driving environmental, social, and political change, and I regularly offer undergraduate courses on American Environmental History, Food & Farmers, Law and Society, and the History of the US West, and regularly advise undergraduate students in capstone research projects.  

I also work extensively with graduate students.  At Indiana University-Bloomington I am a member of the new PhD cluster in Environmental History, which is currently recruiting students for admission for the 2025-2026 academic year.  I sit on the College Committee on Graduate Education and have served on the Department of History Graduate Advisory Committee.  At the University of Kansas I worked as Director of Graduate Studies from 2013-2016, and won the university-wide graduate mentoring award in 2015.  Former MA and PhD advisees teach, research, and do advocacy work at colleges, universities, and government agencies throughout the United States.   

I am currently accepting new graduate students.

My advocacy work centers on climate and energy policy, equity and justice within higher education, and cultivating a sense of place as a means of sustaining community and nurturing resilience at a regional scale.  I am a co-convenor of the Women’s Environmental History Network (WEHN) and serve on the American Society of Environmental History (ASEH) Professional Development Committee.

Selected Honors + Awards

• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, for Prairie Metamorphosis, 2022-2023

• Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society Fellowship, Munich, Germany, 2017

• Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award, University of Kansas, 2015

• Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for superior scholarship in Forest and Conservation History, for Managing the Mountains, 2011