Dr. Joshua Nygren

Curriculum Vita

Education

Ph.D. University of Kansas

B.A. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Areas of Interest

Joshua Nygren is a historian interested in the political economy of environmental protection. His research focuses on the relationships between government, industry, and individuals within twentieth-century US conservation efforts. His first book, The State of Conservation: Rural America and the Conservation-Industrial Complex since 1920  (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), explores soil and water conservation and how it reshaped the landscapes and communities of rural America. The State of Conservation won the 2025 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award from the Agricultural History Society for the best book on agricultural history in the United States. Nygren's next project focuses on the political economy of papermaking and forest conservation in the twentieth-century Great Lakes region. His articles and chapters have appeared in Environmental History, Agricultural History, Michigan Historical Review, and The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region's Environmental Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

At UCM Professor Nygren has taught courses on various topics, including the introductory survey in US history since 1877, historical methods, global and US environmental history, the US West, rural America, post-World War II US history, and the history of the 1990s told through Seinfeld. One of his greatest satisfactions in teaching is guiding student research. He lives in Kansas City with his wife and two children and roots for the Green Bay Packers.