Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann
Assistant Professor of History,
Appalachian State University
About Me
Dr. Stephen Hausmann is an award-winning historian, writer, educator, and podcaster. He has taught in higher education since 2015 at several institutions, including the University of Pittsburgh, the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, and Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, where he currently is an assistant professor of American environmental history. He has taught college-level courses on 19th and 20th United States history, environmental history, Native American and Indigenous history, the History of the American West, and the history of medicine, among other topics. In recent years, he has also served in nonprofit leadership as the assistant director and acting executive director for the American Society for Environmental History, and currently sits on that organization's executive board. In 2024-2025, Stephen was a National Park Service-Mellon Research Fellow at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota.
His research exists at the intersection of environmental and cultural history, and is interested in questions about how human stories influence nonhuman environments and vice versa. His current book project, under contract with the University of Nebraska Press, explores this dynamic in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The book examines how humans, including ancient and contemporary Indigenous people as well as Euro-American settlers, have made meaning in the Black Hills via such disparate ecological changes as creating rock art and building tourist attractions in the region. In short, Stephen is
Interested in the question: how do the stories we tell about places shape how we treat environments and the beings who live within them?
This research has been funded by an array of institutions, including Temple University, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Newberry Library, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. In 2022, an article based on this research won the Arrell M. Gibson Award for best article on Native American History from the Western History Association. He is an active public historian, and is passionate about making academic history accessible to the wider public.
To learn more about Stephen's academic background, published work, and research and teaching interests, click the link below to access my CV.
Writing
Stephen Hausmann has written for several outlets, both public and academic, including the Washington Post, Perspectives, and the Western Historical Quarterly. Links to his writing can be found below.
Stephen R. Hausmann, "On Myths and Monuments: Mount Rushmore and Storytelling at America's National Parks," Perspectives on History, July 9, 2025.
Stephen R. Hausmann, "The Midwest at the Center of Late Twentieth Century Environmentalism," Middle West Review 11, no. 2 (Spring 2025): 137-145.
Stephen R. Hausmann, "A largely forgotten flood ignited the environmental justice movement," The Washington Post, June 9, 2022.
Stephen R. Hausmann, "The complicated legacy of the 1972 Rapid City Flood," Rapid City Journal, June 8, 2022.
Stephen R. Hausmann, "Erasing Indian Country: Urban Native Space and the 1972 Rapid City Flood," Western Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (Autumn 2021): 305-329.
-
Winner, 2022 Arrell M. Gibson Award for best article in Native American history, Western History Association
Stephen R. Hausmann, "'We Must Perform Experiments on Some Living Body': Antivivisection and American Medicine, 1850-1915," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 16, no. 3 (July 2017): 264-283.
Podcasting
Since 2017, Dr. Hausmann has hosted the “New Books in the American West” podcast, part of the New Books Network of podcasts. This series is designed to introduce listeners of all backgrounds to new scholarly work being created about the American West.