Dr. Stephen Hausmann earned his B.A. and M.A. From the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. from Temple University. His areas of expertise include American history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, environmental history, Native American history, and the history of the American West. At App State, he teaches courses on American history, environmental history, and the history of national parks. His first book, under contract with the University of Nebraska Press, is tentatively titled Indian Country: An Environmental History of the Black Hills. This project examines the intersection between human culture and non-human environment in the American West through the histories of places like Mount Rushmore and events like the 1972 Rapid City Flood. Dr. Hausmann has written for the Western Historical Quarterly, Middle West Review, the Washington Post, the Rapid City Journal, among other outlets. His research on the Black Hills has been funded by the Newberry Library, the Linda Hall Library, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and other institutions.
While he is completing his current book, Dr. Hausmann is also getting underway on a new project: an environmental history of the Land Back movement which stretches its origins back to the seventeenth century and beyond. He is active in various scholarly organizations, having previously served as assistant director for the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), and in 2024 as that organization's acting executive director. Currently, he is serving a four-year term as a member of the ASEH Executive Council and is also active on both prize and leadership committees for the Western History Association. In 2024-2025, Dr. Hausmann was a Mellon Research Fellow with the National Park Service, doing historical work at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota. When not teaching, reading, or writing history, he can be found rooting for his oft-beleaguered Boston Red Sox, playing any and all history-based video games, and spending time outside.
Education
Ph.D. Temple University
Areas of Study
United States History, Environmental History, Native American History, History of the American West
Selected Courses
HIS 3237 Nature, Wilderness, and American Life
HIS 3238 America’s National Parks
Selected Publications
“Marketing Eternity: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change at Twentieth-Century Mount Rushmore” in Raw Capital: Building Ecosystems/Selling Natures (Hagley Perspectives in Business and Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, 2025)
“Erasing Indian Country: Urban Native Space and the 1972 Rapid City Flood,” Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 3, Autumn 2021
- Winner, 2022 Arrell M. Gibson Award for best article in Native American history, Western History Association
“’We Must Perform Experiments on Some Living Body’: Antivivisection and American Medicine, 1850-1915,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2017
