Dr. Sara Dant

t Sara Dant
Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of History

Biography

Sara Dant is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus 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 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 two books on Utah: “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 2024 H. Aldous Dixon Distinguished Faculty Award recipient at Weber State, 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 retired in 2024 to pursue an independent writing career.

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.