Education
Ph.D., Department of History, University of Washington, 1996
M.A., Department of History, University of Oregon, 1992
B.S. with Honors, Department of History, University of Oregon, 1990
Fields of specialization and experience include western North American, environmental, U.S. 19th and 20th century social and cultural, North American colonial, Latin American colonial, and science and technology history.
Employment
Professor and former Canada Research Chair in Environmental History, Department of History, Simon Fraser University, 2004-
Visiting Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Portland, 2009-2010
Assistant and Associate Professor, Department of History, Iowa State University, 1996-2003
Selected Awards & Honors
2021, finalist for Oregon Book Awards Frances Fuller Victor prize for Persistent Callings
2018-2019, Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Fellowship, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina
2017, John Topham and Susan Redd Butler Off-Campus Faculty Award, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University
2015-2016 Visiting Scholar, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
2015 Roosevelt Institute Research Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
2014 Visiting Scholar Award, Carl Albert Center, University of Oklahoma
2012- Researcher, Center for Spatial & Textual Analysis (CESTA), Stanford University
2011-2012 Visiting Scholar Award, Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University
2010 National Outdoor Book Award in History and Biography for Pilgrims of the Vertical
Canada Foundation for Innovation Grant for “Environmental History Data Lab,” 2003-2006
Tier II Canada Research Chair, Simon Fraser University, 2004
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow in Environmental Studies, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina, 2002-2003
Sabbaticals in the Parks Program, Yosemite National Park, Winter-Spring 2002
2000 Library Journal Ten Best Books in Technology and Science for Making Salmon
2000 Theodore C. Blegan Award: Forest History Society for best article in forest and conservation history in 1999 for “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon”
2000 George Perkins Marsh Prize: American Society for Environmental History for best book for Making Salmon
1999 Oscar O. Winther Prize: Western History Association for “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon”
1997 Phi Alpha Theta/Westerners International Prize for best dissertation for “Making Salmon: Economy, Culture, and Science in the Oregon Fisheries”
Current Research Projects
Books
Voice of the West: Colorado's Ed Taylor and the Rise of Modern America
Turning Policy into Law: Congress and Progressive Conservation
Nature and Time: Thinking Historically about Environmental Issues
Publications
Books
Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2019)
Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)
Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fishery Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999)
Refereed Articles and Essays
“Lines That Don’t Divide: Telling Tales about Animals, Chemicals, and People in the Salish Sea,” in Border Flows: A Century of Canadian-American Water Relations, ed. Lynne Heasley and Daniel Macfarlane (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), 213-36.
“To Market, To Market,” in Border Flows: A Century of Canadian-American Water Relations, ed. Lynne Heasley and Daniel Macfarlane (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), 283-85.
w/ Erik Steiner, Celena Allen, and Krista Fryauff, “Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands,” Western Historical Quarterly 47 (Summer 2016): 211-18.
“Western Resistance to Federal Land Control Didn't Start or End with Cliven Bundy,” The American Historian, The Magazine of the Organization of American History (February 2015): 18-21, 47.
“Knowing the Black Box: Methodological Challenges in Marine Environmental History,” Environmental History 18 (January 2013), 60-75.
“Apt,” Thresholds, 39 (June 2011), 9-11.
“Boundary Terminology,” Environmental History 13 (July 2008), 454-81.
“Historical Overview of Hatchery Activities,” in “An Evaluation of the Effects of Conservation and Fishery Enhancement Hatcheries on Wild Populations of Salmon,” ed. Naish, Kerry A., Joseph E. Taylor III, Phillip S. Levin, Thomas P. Quinn, James R. Winton, Daniel Huppert, and Ray Hilborn. Advances in Marine Biology 53 (2007), 71-78.
“Political Dynamics of Hatchery Programmes,” in “An Evaluation of the Effects of Conservation and Fishery Enhancement Hatcheries on Wild Populations of Salmon,” ed. Naish, Kerry A., Joseph E. Taylor III, Phillip S. Levin, Thomas P. Quinn, James R. Winton, Daniel Huppert, and Ray Hilborn. Advances in Marine Biology 53 (2007), 78-84.
“The Nature of Salmon Canneries,” in Canneries on the Columbia: A New Western History, Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon History Project (January 2007), http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/narratives/chapter.cfm?chapter_ID=7E2C0796-BCE9-4B41-18548265670F21B8
“Climber, Granite, Sky,” Environmental History 11 (January 2006), 130-35.
“Mapping Adventure: Class and Gender in Yosemite Valley’s Climbing Landscapes,” Journal of Historical Geography 32 (January 2006), 190-219.
“The Many Lives of the New West,” Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 2004), 141-65.
“Master of the Seas? Herbert Hoover and the Western Fisheries,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 105 (Spring 2004), 40-61.
“Regional Unifier or Cultural Catspaw: The Cultural Geography of Salmon Symbolism in the Pacific Northwest,” in Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity and Play in the New West, ed. Liza Nicholas, Elaine M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 3-26.
“The Historical Roots of Canadian-American Salmon Wars,” in Parallel Destinies: Canadians, Americans, and the Western Border, ed. John Findlay and Ken Coates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 155-80.
“‘Well Thinking Men and Women’: The Battle for the White Act and the Meaning of Conservation in the 1920s” Pacific Historical Review 71 (August 2002), 356-87.
“Misplaced Concreteness: Prospects and Problems with Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Fisheries,” in Microbehavior and Macroresults: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (Corvallis: IIFET, 2000).
“‘Politics Is at the Bottom of the Whole Thing:’ Spatial Relations of Power in Oregon Salmon Management,” in Power and Place in the North American West, ed. Richard White and John Findlay (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 233-63.
“Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Historicizing Overfishing in Oregon’s Nineteenth-Century Salmon Fisheries,” Environmental History 4 (January 1999), 54-79.
“El Niño and Vanishing Salmon: Culture, Nature, History, and the Politics of Blame,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998), 437-57.
“Making Salmon: The Political Economy of Fishery Science and the Road Not Taken,” Journal of History of Biology 31 (March 1998), 33-59.
“For the Love of It: A Short History of Commercial Fishing in Pacific City, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 82 (January 1991), 22-32.
Non-refereed Articles/Encyclopedia Entries
“Western Grievances Are Real, But Bundy Is the Wrong Guy to Raise Them,” Reuters, 5 January 2016, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2016/01/06/western-grievances-are-real-but-bundy-is-the-wrong-guy-to-raise-them/
w/ Peter Boag. “Richard Maxwell Brown, 1927-1959,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 105 (Fall 2014), 189-91.
“Remembering a Mushroom Cloud,” BlogWest.org, 28 August 2015, http://blogwest.org/2015/08/28/remembering-a-mushroom-cloud/
Essays for High Country News' "The Range" blog: http://www.hcn.org/@@search?portal_type%3Alist=Blog+Post&Creator=josephtaylor&sort_on=PublicationDate&sort_order=descending
“Teaching the Environmental History of the North American West,” The WHA Newsletter. Teaching the West, A Special Issue (Spring 2012), 12-13.
“Columbia River Basin” in The Americas and Oceania: Assessing Sustainability (Boston: Berkshire Publishing Group and Routledge Press, in press, February 2012).
“Salmon,” for The Oregon Encyclopedia Project, http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/salmon/ (6 February 2012).
Associate Editor, Oxford Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, 4 vols., ed. Kathleen Brosnan (Facts on File, 2010).
“Time and Nature,” Rural Connections, A Publication of the Western Rural Development Center (May 2010), 23-26.
“Forward to the Past,” in A Think Tank on Transferable Shares in the Salmon Fishery: A Special Seminar of the Speaking for the Salmon Series. Eds., Hall, Trisha, Patricia Gallaugher, and Laurie Wood. Burnaby. SFU Centre for Coastal Studies, 2009: 7-12. http://www.sfu.ca/cstudies/science/tssf.htm
“Keynote Address: Claiming Nature in the North American West.” in Convergence and Divergence in North America: Canada and the United States. Eds. Froschauer, Karl, Nadine Fabbi, and Susan Pell. Burnaby: Centre for Canadian Studies, Simon Fraser University Document Solutions, 2006: 35-38.
“Caste from the Past,” with Matthew Klingle, Grist Magazine, 8 March 2006, http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2006/03/08/klingle/; and “Authors Respond”, Grist Magazine, 15 March 2006, http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/3/8/114015/9127.
“Columbia River,” "Salmon," and "Sturgeon" in The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, 3 vols. (Boston: Berkshire Publishing Group and Routledge Press, 2004).
“Fisheries,” in The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul Boyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 268.
“Fisheries: The West,” in The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard Lamar (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 370-73.
Book Reviews
I have written more than seventy book and movie reviews for Agricultural History, American Historical Review, Annals of Iowa, BC Studies, Diplomatic History, Environment & History, Environmental History, H-Net, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, International Journal of Maritime History, Journal of American History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of the History of Biology, Journal of the West, Montana, The Magazine of Western History, Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, New Mexico Historical Review, The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, The Public Historian, and Western Historical Quarterly
Recent Presentations
“Ex Post Trump: Sustaining Public Lands under Climate Change and Populism.” Kohn Colloquium, University of Iowa, 21 February 2020.
“On Evidentness: Parsing People and Paper when Researching a Disaster that Happens to Be Home.” History Department Colloquium, Iowa State University, 20 February 2020.
“Why Congress Matters,” Beyond Despair: Theory and Practice in Environmental Humanities Conference, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina, 5 April 2019.
“The Progressive Roots of ALEC: Familial Wealth and Anti-Democracy in the Conservation Era.” Bowdoin College, 18 February 2019:
“The State in Nature: The Political Economy of Public Lands,” North Carolina State University, 17 January 2019.
“It’s More Complicated Than That: Rural Extremism in the Current American West,” Violence, Victims, and Extremism: The Political Extremism of Our Time, Simon Fraser University, 5 April 2018.
“‘These People’: Bernard DeVoto’s Benighted West,” Western History Association, San Diego, 3 November 2017.
“Follow the Money,” Six Shooters Panel, annual meeting of the Western History Association, San Diego, 2 November 2017
“Follow the Money: Mapping Transfer Payments and Unlearning Wisdom about the Federal Domain in the American West.” Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 12 October 2017.
“What Role Do Historians Play in Public Land and Water Policy?” Panel Speaker, follow-up panel to plenary at “Rural Utah, Western Issues,” annual meeting of the State History Conference, Salt Lake City, 30 September 2016.
“Remembering Political Economy: Seeing the Western Federal Domain through Congress’ Eyes,” Plenary Session for “Rural Utah, Western Issues, annual meeting of the State History Conference, Salt Lake City, 30 September 2016.
“What Is the Role of History in Public Land and Water Policy Debates? A Seminar,” a closed meeting seminar for “Rural Utah, Western Issues,” annual meeting of the State History Conference, Salt Lake City, 29 September 2016.
“The Long Arc of Progressive Conservation,” Lecture, University of Utah, 29 September 2016.
“Mounting Passions: Nature, Gender, and Sex in John Muir’s Letters,” Thinking Mountains 2015, Interdisciplinary Mountain Studies Conference: Mountain Literature and 19th, Jasper, Alberta, 2 May 2015.
“Poetry vs. Prose: Why Legislative History Changes How We Understand Progressive Conservation,” American Society for Environmental History, Washington, DC, 20 March 2015.
Service
I am a member of the Western Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Society for Environmental History, and Network in Canadian History & Environment. My service has included chairing the WHA's Walter Rundell Award Committee, ASEH program committee, ASEH Publications Committee, and ASEH Secretary. I co-chaired the ASEH-FHS Journal Management Group and co-organized the "Bridging National Borders in North America." I have been an editorial board member of Pacific Historical Review and Western Historical Quarterly.
Ph.D., Department of History, University of Washington, 1996
M.A., Department of History, University of Oregon, 1992
B.S. with Honors, Department of History, University of Oregon, 1990
Fields of specialization and experience include western North American, environmental, U.S. 19th and 20th century social and cultural, North American colonial, Latin American colonial, and science and technology history.
Employment
Professor and former Canada Research Chair in Environmental History, Department of History, Simon Fraser University, 2004-
Visiting Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Portland, 2009-2010
Assistant and Associate Professor, Department of History, Iowa State University, 1996-2003
Selected Awards & Honors
2021, finalist for Oregon Book Awards Frances Fuller Victor prize for Persistent Callings
2018-2019, Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams, Jr. Fellowship, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina
2017, John Topham and Susan Redd Butler Off-Campus Faculty Award, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University
2015-2016 Visiting Scholar, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
2015 Roosevelt Institute Research Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library
2014 Visiting Scholar Award, Carl Albert Center, University of Oklahoma
2012- Researcher, Center for Spatial & Textual Analysis (CESTA), Stanford University
2011-2012 Visiting Scholar Award, Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University
2010 National Outdoor Book Award in History and Biography for Pilgrims of the Vertical
Canada Foundation for Innovation Grant for “Environmental History Data Lab,” 2003-2006
Tier II Canada Research Chair, Simon Fraser University, 2004
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow in Environmental Studies, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina, 2002-2003
Sabbaticals in the Parks Program, Yosemite National Park, Winter-Spring 2002
2000 Library Journal Ten Best Books in Technology and Science for Making Salmon
2000 Theodore C. Blegan Award: Forest History Society for best article in forest and conservation history in 1999 for “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon”
2000 George Perkins Marsh Prize: American Society for Environmental History for best book for Making Salmon
1999 Oscar O. Winther Prize: Western History Association for “El Niño and Vanishing Salmon”
1997 Phi Alpha Theta/Westerners International Prize for best dissertation for “Making Salmon: Economy, Culture, and Science in the Oregon Fisheries”
Current Research Projects
Books
Voice of the West: Colorado's Ed Taylor and the Rise of Modern America
Turning Policy into Law: Congress and Progressive Conservation
Nature and Time: Thinking Historically about Environmental Issues
Publications
Books
Persistent Callings: Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2019)
Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)
Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fishery Crisis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999)
Refereed Articles and Essays
“Lines That Don’t Divide: Telling Tales about Animals, Chemicals, and People in the Salish Sea,” in Border Flows: A Century of Canadian-American Water Relations, ed. Lynne Heasley and Daniel Macfarlane (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), 213-36.
“To Market, To Market,” in Border Flows: A Century of Canadian-American Water Relations, ed. Lynne Heasley and Daniel Macfarlane (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016), 283-85.
w/ Erik Steiner, Celena Allen, and Krista Fryauff, “Follow the Money: A Spatial History of In-Lieu Programs for Western Federal Lands,” Western Historical Quarterly 47 (Summer 2016): 211-18.
“Western Resistance to Federal Land Control Didn't Start or End with Cliven Bundy,” The American Historian, The Magazine of the Organization of American History (February 2015): 18-21, 47.
“Knowing the Black Box: Methodological Challenges in Marine Environmental History,” Environmental History 18 (January 2013), 60-75.
“Apt,” Thresholds, 39 (June 2011), 9-11.
“Boundary Terminology,” Environmental History 13 (July 2008), 454-81.
“Historical Overview of Hatchery Activities,” in “An Evaluation of the Effects of Conservation and Fishery Enhancement Hatcheries on Wild Populations of Salmon,” ed. Naish, Kerry A., Joseph E. Taylor III, Phillip S. Levin, Thomas P. Quinn, James R. Winton, Daniel Huppert, and Ray Hilborn. Advances in Marine Biology 53 (2007), 71-78.
“Political Dynamics of Hatchery Programmes,” in “An Evaluation of the Effects of Conservation and Fishery Enhancement Hatcheries on Wild Populations of Salmon,” ed. Naish, Kerry A., Joseph E. Taylor III, Phillip S. Levin, Thomas P. Quinn, James R. Winton, Daniel Huppert, and Ray Hilborn. Advances in Marine Biology 53 (2007), 78-84.
“The Nature of Salmon Canneries,” in Canneries on the Columbia: A New Western History, Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon History Project (January 2007), http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/narratives/chapter.cfm?chapter_ID=7E2C0796-BCE9-4B41-18548265670F21B8
“Climber, Granite, Sky,” Environmental History 11 (January 2006), 130-35.
“Mapping Adventure: Class and Gender in Yosemite Valley’s Climbing Landscapes,” Journal of Historical Geography 32 (January 2006), 190-219.
“The Many Lives of the New West,” Western Historical Quarterly 35 (Summer 2004), 141-65.
“Master of the Seas? Herbert Hoover and the Western Fisheries,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 105 (Spring 2004), 40-61.
“Regional Unifier or Cultural Catspaw: The Cultural Geography of Salmon Symbolism in the Pacific Northwest,” in Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity and Play in the New West, ed. Liza Nicholas, Elaine M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003), 3-26.
“The Historical Roots of Canadian-American Salmon Wars,” in Parallel Destinies: Canadians, Americans, and the Western Border, ed. John Findlay and Ken Coates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 155-80.
“‘Well Thinking Men and Women’: The Battle for the White Act and the Meaning of Conservation in the 1920s” Pacific Historical Review 71 (August 2002), 356-87.
“Misplaced Concreteness: Prospects and Problems with Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Fisheries,” in Microbehavior and Macroresults: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (Corvallis: IIFET, 2000).
“‘Politics Is at the Bottom of the Whole Thing:’ Spatial Relations of Power in Oregon Salmon Management,” in Power and Place in the North American West, ed. Richard White and John Findlay (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 233-63.
“Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Historicizing Overfishing in Oregon’s Nineteenth-Century Salmon Fisheries,” Environmental History 4 (January 1999), 54-79.
“El Niño and Vanishing Salmon: Culture, Nature, History, and the Politics of Blame,” Western Historical Quarterly 29 (Winter 1998), 437-57.
“Making Salmon: The Political Economy of Fishery Science and the Road Not Taken,” Journal of History of Biology 31 (March 1998), 33-59.
“For the Love of It: A Short History of Commercial Fishing in Pacific City, Oregon,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 82 (January 1991), 22-32.
Non-refereed Articles/Encyclopedia Entries
“Western Grievances Are Real, But Bundy Is the Wrong Guy to Raise Them,” Reuters, 5 January 2016, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2016/01/06/western-grievances-are-real-but-bundy-is-the-wrong-guy-to-raise-them/
w/ Peter Boag. “Richard Maxwell Brown, 1927-1959,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 105 (Fall 2014), 189-91.
“Remembering a Mushroom Cloud,” BlogWest.org, 28 August 2015, http://blogwest.org/2015/08/28/remembering-a-mushroom-cloud/
Essays for High Country News' "The Range" blog: http://www.hcn.org/@@search?portal_type%3Alist=Blog+Post&Creator=josephtaylor&sort_on=PublicationDate&sort_order=descending
“Teaching the Environmental History of the North American West,” The WHA Newsletter. Teaching the West, A Special Issue (Spring 2012), 12-13.
“Columbia River Basin” in The Americas and Oceania: Assessing Sustainability (Boston: Berkshire Publishing Group and Routledge Press, in press, February 2012).
“Salmon,” for The Oregon Encyclopedia Project, http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/entry/view/salmon/ (6 February 2012).
Associate Editor, Oxford Encyclopedia of American Environmental History, 4 vols., ed. Kathleen Brosnan (Facts on File, 2010).
“Time and Nature,” Rural Connections, A Publication of the Western Rural Development Center (May 2010), 23-26.
“Forward to the Past,” in A Think Tank on Transferable Shares in the Salmon Fishery: A Special Seminar of the Speaking for the Salmon Series. Eds., Hall, Trisha, Patricia Gallaugher, and Laurie Wood. Burnaby. SFU Centre for Coastal Studies, 2009: 7-12. http://www.sfu.ca/cstudies/science/tssf.htm
“Keynote Address: Claiming Nature in the North American West.” in Convergence and Divergence in North America: Canada and the United States. Eds. Froschauer, Karl, Nadine Fabbi, and Susan Pell. Burnaby: Centre for Canadian Studies, Simon Fraser University Document Solutions, 2006: 35-38.
“Caste from the Past,” with Matthew Klingle, Grist Magazine, 8 March 2006, http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2006/03/08/klingle/; and “Authors Respond”, Grist Magazine, 15 March 2006, http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/3/8/114015/9127.
“Columbia River,” "Salmon," and "Sturgeon" in The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, 3 vols. (Boston: Berkshire Publishing Group and Routledge Press, 2004).
“Fisheries,” in The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul Boyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 268.
“Fisheries: The West,” in The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard Lamar (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 370-73.
Book Reviews
I have written more than seventy book and movie reviews for Agricultural History, American Historical Review, Annals of Iowa, BC Studies, Diplomatic History, Environment & History, Environmental History, H-Net, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, International Journal of Maritime History, Journal of American History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Journal of the History of Biology, Journal of the West, Montana, The Magazine of Western History, Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, New Mexico Historical Review, The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, The Public Historian, and Western Historical Quarterly
Recent Presentations
“Ex Post Trump: Sustaining Public Lands under Climate Change and Populism.” Kohn Colloquium, University of Iowa, 21 February 2020.
“On Evidentness: Parsing People and Paper when Researching a Disaster that Happens to Be Home.” History Department Colloquium, Iowa State University, 20 February 2020.
“Why Congress Matters,” Beyond Despair: Theory and Practice in Environmental Humanities Conference, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle, North Carolina, 5 April 2019.
“The Progressive Roots of ALEC: Familial Wealth and Anti-Democracy in the Conservation Era.” Bowdoin College, 18 February 2019:
“The State in Nature: The Political Economy of Public Lands,” North Carolina State University, 17 January 2019.
“It’s More Complicated Than That: Rural Extremism in the Current American West,” Violence, Victims, and Extremism: The Political Extremism of Our Time, Simon Fraser University, 5 April 2018.
“‘These People’: Bernard DeVoto’s Benighted West,” Western History Association, San Diego, 3 November 2017.
“Follow the Money,” Six Shooters Panel, annual meeting of the Western History Association, San Diego, 2 November 2017
“Follow the Money: Mapping Transfer Payments and Unlearning Wisdom about the Federal Domain in the American West.” Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 12 October 2017.
“What Role Do Historians Play in Public Land and Water Policy?” Panel Speaker, follow-up panel to plenary at “Rural Utah, Western Issues,” annual meeting of the State History Conference, Salt Lake City, 30 September 2016.
“Remembering Political Economy: Seeing the Western Federal Domain through Congress’ Eyes,” Plenary Session for “Rural Utah, Western Issues, annual meeting of the State History Conference, Salt Lake City, 30 September 2016.
“What Is the Role of History in Public Land and Water Policy Debates? A Seminar,” a closed meeting seminar for “Rural Utah, Western Issues,” annual meeting of the State History Conference, Salt Lake City, 29 September 2016.
“The Long Arc of Progressive Conservation,” Lecture, University of Utah, 29 September 2016.
“Mounting Passions: Nature, Gender, and Sex in John Muir’s Letters,” Thinking Mountains 2015, Interdisciplinary Mountain Studies Conference: Mountain Literature and 19th, Jasper, Alberta, 2 May 2015.
“Poetry vs. Prose: Why Legislative History Changes How We Understand Progressive Conservation,” American Society for Environmental History, Washington, DC, 20 March 2015.
Service
I am a member of the Western Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Society for Environmental History, and Network in Canadian History & Environment. My service has included chairing the WHA's Walter Rundell Award Committee, ASEH program committee, ASEH Publications Committee, and ASEH Secretary. I co-chaired the ASEH-FHS Journal Management Group and co-organized the "Bridging National Borders in North America." I have been an editorial board member of Pacific Historical Review and Western Historical Quarterly.
