Associate Professor of History
United States History: environment, agriculture, politics, West
My research considers how national politics and governance are shaped by environmental and natural resource concerns. I am the author of This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal, published in 2007, and co-author of The Kitchen Debate and Cold War Consumer Politics, published in 2014. I have written essays and articles on the Dust Bowl, transatlantic agricultural exchange, antebellum reform, environmental history as a scholarly field, the American economy between World Wars I and II, and the conservation and environmental policy of state governors. I have just finished a new article for the Journal of American History on the modern agricultural surplus and the free-market turn in farm commodity support policy during the 1960s. From 2016 to 2022 I served as founding executive co-editor of Modern American History, a new journal from Cambridge University Press covering all aspects of the United States since the 1890s. My current book project, Belly of Empire: Oklahoma’s Progressive Politics and the End of Indian Territory, considers how an interlaced study of Indigenous dispossession, land allotment, and white rural poverty can help stitch together the dominant national narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am the current President of the Agricultural History Society and an AHS Life Member.