Erika Bsumek

Erika Bsumek has written on Native American history, environmental history/studies, the history of the built environment, and the history of the U.S. West. 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). 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 “Infrastructures of Dispossession: Latter-Day Saints, American Indians, and Water Technologies 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 is also the creator of digital timeline software, called Cliovis, that enables students and researchers to create time aligned network maps of their class/research projects.