Landlover.

I am a public environmental historian whose work explores the relationships between humans and places throughout the American West. Growing up on a farm in Montana instilled in me a deep love of open space and sensitivity to landscape.

Academic.

My work explores landscapes, environmental perspectives, and visual culture in the North American West. I ask where history is emplaced, how narratives are shaped, and whose stories are told. My work is committed to honoring diverse ways of knowing and examining the assumptions that underpin relationships between humans and the greater-than-human world.

My first book project, Aerial Empire: Contested Sovereignties and the American West tells an environmental history of air in the Mountain West—a story that shifts our attention skyward as the climate crisis demands that we relate differently with the atmosphere. Aerial Empire examines efforts to commodify and control air in the Western U.S. from 1870 through 1990 arguing that atmospheric management mediated federal-Indigenous relations in new ways. This history of efforts to delineate, own, and regulate the skies asks us to reconsider the successes of settler colonialism, takes non-human agency seriously, and identifies a through-line from territorial annexation to contemporary environmental injustices.

I am also the author of Ancient Sites in Modern Times: Bandelier National Monument at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (forthcoming through the National Park Service). Ancient Sites in Modern Times examines how changes in federal policy, Pueblo and Tribal Nations, and wildfires altered the landscape and administration of one National Monument. The narrative sheds light on larger shifts in federal-Indigenous relations and land management agencies at a time when Pueblo and Tribal Nations gained greater leverage through federal legislation and land management agencies emphasized climate science and integrated resource management while confronting reduced budgets.

Writer.

My scholarship and writing have been published with Routledge, Environmental History, Digital Culture and Education, Teachers College Record, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and Willowdown Books. I also hold an EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I worked in engaged research and intercultural exchange. When not researching, writing, or teaching, I can be found roaming the with my four-legged friend Bernadette.

photo credit: Meesh Magart