I grew up in Boulder, Colorado and received my BA and MA from the University of Colorado. I traveled east for my Ph. D., graduating from Yale University in 2003. Since 2004, I have taught American history at the University of Notre Dame, where I hold the rank of full professor. I have written three books: Vicious: Wolves and America (Yale, 2004), Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, a Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation (Hill & Wang, 2012), and Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America (Yale, 2020). Vicious won the W. Turrentine Jackson Award from the Western History Association for the best first book in western American history and the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association for the outstanding monograph in U. S. history published by a young scholar (defined as a first or a second book). I received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and an ACLS Fellowship in 2020. My next book, The Mighty Kankakee: History Against the Current will examine the history of the vast wetlands in northern Indiana and Illinois, a the soggy Midwestern marvel that has since been drained.