Jared Farmer

Jared Farmer studies the overlapping historical dimensions of landscape, environment, technology, science, religion, culture, and law. His temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West.

Farmer has received fellowships and grants from institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard University Press, 2008) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. In 2014, the Dallas Institute presented him the Hiett Prize in the Humanities; in 2017, the Carnegie Corporation of New York named him an Andrew Carnegie Fellow; and in 2018, the American Academy in Berlin awarded him a Berlin Prize.

Prof. Farmer uses Instagram to record his landscape observations.

His recent peer-reviewed work includes “Executive Domain: Military Reservations in the Wartime West,” in World War II and the West It Wrought (Stanford, 2020); “Taking Liberties with Historic Trees,” in the Journal of American History (March 2019); and “Technofossil,” in Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (Chicago, 2018). His current book project is a place-based planetary history of ancient trees and the problem of long-term thinking.

Prof. Farmer will be accepting doctoral advisees in the 2020–21 application season.