Dr. Erika Bsumek
Professor and Ellen Clark Temple Chair in Women's History
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts
UT Austin
Dr. Bsumek is the Ellen Clark Temple Chair in Women's History. She 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 Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2013). Her most recent book explores the social and environmental history of the area surrounding Glen Canyon on the Utah/Arizona border from the 1840s to the present. The title that book is The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (2023). 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 tentatively titled “Unsettling Narratives: Rose Daniels, Indentured Servitude, and the Creation of an American Symbol.”
Dr. Bsumek has written op-eds for publications such as Time, the Austin American Statesman, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera America, and the Pacific Standard. She 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 a digital timeline and network mapping software platform called ClioVis, which enables students and researchers to create time-aligned network maps of their class/research projects. The platform has served over 32,000 students. She is also the lead scholar on the Radical Hope Syllabus Project and the coordinator of the website.
