Erika M Bsumek

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. She is the author of the award-winning, Indian-made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1848-1960 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and the coeditor of a collection of essays on global environmental history titled The 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: Native Americans, Latter-day Saints, and the Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam, 1800 to 1980." 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" and a biography of a Navajo woman who was enslaved by the Utes, sold to LDS settlers, and then who became a well-known figure in the region titled "From Captive to Cultivator, Slave to Symbol: The Life and Times of Rose Daniels."

She has written op-eds for publications such as Time, the Austin American Statesman, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera America, and Pacific Standard and has been a Provost's Teaching Fellow and has been named a UT-Austin Academy of Distinguished Teacher and a
UT System Regents Distinguished Teaching Professor. She is also the creator of digital timeline software, called ClioVis, which enables students and researchers to create time-aligned network maps of their class/research projects.