Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Native American, U.S. West, Environment, Built Environment, Water, Infrastructure

About Me: Professor Bsumek has written on Native American history, environmental history/studies, the history of the built environment, and the history of the U.S. West. Her current research explores the social and environmental history of the area surrounding Glen Canyon on the Utah/Arizona border from the 1840s to the present. The working title of the book is “Damming Zion: Mormons, Indians, and the Fight for Resources on the Colorado Plateau, 1800 to the Present.” She is also working on a larger project that examines the impact that large construction projects (dams, highways, cities and suburbs) had on the American West which is tentatively titled “The Concrete West: Engineering Society and Culture in the Arid West, 1900-1970.” She has written OpEds for publications such as Time, the Austin American Statesman, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera America, and Pacific Standard and is currently a Provost’s Teaching Fellow. She has also developed innovative timeline software for use in history courses and is happy to talk about pedagogy and digital humanities/learning.

Recent Publications

She is author of the award winning, Indian-made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1848-1860 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and the coeditor a collection of essays on global environmental history titled Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History(Oxford University Press, 2013). She has also published OpEds on a variety of topics. You can find articles she’s published on her CV.

Expertise by Topic: Capitalism, Colonialism, Higher Ed, Pedagogy, Science, Technology