Kathleen Brosnan
Associate Professor (United States, Environment)
533 Agnes Arnold Hall
(713) 743-3120
kbrosnan@uh.edu

A scholar of the American West, Kathleen A. Brosnan contemplates the intersection of environmental, urban, and legal histories in that region. In addition to a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, she holds a J.D. from the University of Illinois and a courtesy appointment with the UH Law Center. Dr. Brosnan serves on the editorial boards of the Western Historical Quarterly and The Journal of Urban History and the executive committee of the American Society for Environmental History.

Teaching:
Dr. Brosnan’s undergraduate courses include the Environment in U.S. History and the American West. She teaches a graduate course in environmental history that adopts a bioregional approach to the study of the United States and another that explores the implications of modernity and political ideology for state management of natural resources across the globe. Dr. Brosnan is active in the UH Public History program.

Research:
Dr. Brosnan’s first book, Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change Along the Front Range (2002) examines the integration of diverse and distant hinterlands into the Denver-based, regional economic system following the discovery of gold. Dr. Brosnan is currently working on a three-book project that uses wine and law as windows on global consumer societies, explores the symbolic meanings and concrete realities of its production for labor and land, and addresses the role of law and educational institutions in the construction of those meanings and realities. Tentative titles are A Contested Vintage: Consumerism, Land, Law, and Labor in Napa’s Wine Culture; Transplanted Vines: Cultural Colonization and Ecological Imperialism in the New World; and Food, Culture and the American University.

Selected Publications:
Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law and Environmental Change Along the Front Range (University of New Mexico, 2002).

“Dixie Cups and Agricultural Sustainability in California’s Napa Valley,” Frontieres (Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne), July 2005.

“Public Presence, Public Silence: Nuns, Bishops and the Gendered Space of Chicago,” The Catholic Historical Review, July 2004, 473-96.

“Effluence, Affluence, and the Maturing of Urban Environmental History," Journal of Urban History, November 2004, 115-23.

Frontier in American Culture: Curriculum Materials (Newberry Library, 1994).

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