Call for Papers
Outdoor Recreation History in the North American West
Proposal Deadline: 15 January 2025
Seminar Date: 7-8 August 2025
North American West landscapes of mountains, forests, deserts, and rivers have served as sites for survival and work for centuries, but also as a playground. The development and growth of camping, hiking, hunting and fishing, skiing, biking, mountain and rock climbing, river-running, and other activities play key roles in attracting visitors to the region, retaining residents by driving local economies, coloring regional cultures, and shaping how many perceive the region. The viability these activities and the health of their associated outdoor spaces have faced continual challenge and change. Today, these include new technologies that are altering the forms of outdoor recreation and who participates in them, fast-growing recreation and tourism industries that dominate regional economies, increased usage and consumer demands that stress environments and those tasked with managing them, and changing climates. All this makes for uncertain futures and demands fuller historical understanding. New scholarship that acknowledges these issues along with colonial pasts, Indigenous relationships with landscapes, accessibility inequities to BIPOC and marginalized communities, survival of local communities, and other fraught issues can help better inform our present and guide our futures.
To facilitate these conversations, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University will host a fully funded 2-day seminar on August 7-8, 2025. Selected participants will write and pre-circulate chapter-length pieces (approximately 6,000-8,000 words) before gathering on the BYU campus to workshop them together. These will subsequently be revised and published as an edited collection. Redd Center Associate Director and Professor of History Brenden W. Rensink will serve as seminar organizer and volume editor. Historians Annie Coleman (Notre Dame), Phoebe Young (CU-Boulder), and others will help facilitate small- and large-group workshop sessions. Authors are encouraged to consider diverse voices and perspectives in their work. Senior and junior scholars (including graduate students) are welcomed.
Apply using this link (https://tinyurl.com/outdoorrecreationhistory) by January 15, 2025.
Contact Brenden W. Rensink at bwrensink@byu.edu if you have questions.
Past edited volumes that have emerged from past Redd Center seminars include:
- Religion in the American West, Todd M. Kerstetter and Fred E. Woods, eds. (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming)
- The North American West in the Twenty-First Century, Brenden W. Rensink, ed. (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)
- Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, eds. (University of Utah Press, 2019)
- Reconstruction and Mormon America, Clyde A. Milner, II and Brian Q. Cannon, eds. (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019)
- The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey, eds. (University of Utah Press, 2018)
- Immigrants in the Far West: Historical Identities and Experiences, Jessie L. Embry and Brian Q. Cannon, eds. (University of Utah Press, 2013)
- Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West, Jessie L. Embry, ed. (University of Arizona Press, 2013)
- Utah in the Twentieth Century, Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie L. Embry, eds. (Utah State University Press, 2009)