Dr. Sara Dant

Sara DantChair of History
Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor

Office:  Lindquist Hall 258
Phone: 801-626-6699 
Email: sdant@weber.edu

Profile on Google Scholar

Biography

Sara Dant is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor and Chair of History whose work focuses on environmental politics in the United States with a particular emphasis on the creation and development of consensus and bipartisanism. Dr. Dant’s latest book is a new, completely revised and updated edition of Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (2023, University of Nebraska Press) with a foreword by Tom S. Udall. Dr. Dant is also an advisor and interviewee for Ken Burns' The American Buffalo documentary film (October 2023), the author of several prize-winning articles on western environmental politics, a precedent-setting Expert Witness Report and Testimony on Stream Navigability upheld by the Utah Supreme Court (2017), co-author of the two-volume Encyclopedia of American National Parks (2004) with Hal Rothman, and she has written chapters for three books on Utah: “Selling and Saving Utah, 1945-Present” in Utah History (forthcoming), “The ‘Lion of the Lord’ and the Land: Brigham Young's Environmental Ethic,” in The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays in Mormon Environmental History, ed. by Jedidiah Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 29-46, and “Going with the Flow: Navigating to Stream Access Consensus,” in Desert Water: The Future of Utah’s Water Resources (2014). Dr. Dant was the 2019-2020 John S. Hinckley Fellow at Weber State for excellence in scholarship, teaching, and service and was recognized as a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor in 2020. She serves on PhD dissertation committees, regularly presents at scholarly conferences, works on cutting-edge conservation programs, and gives numerous public presentations. Dr. Dant teaches lower-division courses in American history and upper-division courses on the American West and US environmental history, as well as historical methods and the senior seminar.

Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (2023 University of Nebraska Press) is a captivating narrative written for a general audience about the interaction between people and nature over time. Foreword by former NM Senator Tom Udall. Available on Amazon.