Sara Gregg

Sara Gregg

Office: 3617 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9468
Email: sgregg@ku.edu

Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Columbia University in the City of New York, 2004; M.A. Columbia University, 2001; B.A. Middlebury College, 1997).

Sara Gregg works on the environmental history of North America, with a particular focus on the intersections of environmental change with politics and agriculture. Her current project examines the environmental and economic implications of the 1862 Homestead Act for both the American West and the nation-state.

Gregg’s first book, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia(Yale, 2010), analyzed the evolution of state and federal conservation policy in Appalachia, exploring the environmental impacts of state formation during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Using a case study approach to the contemporaneous development of the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont, and New Deal Resettlement Administration projects, Managing the Mountains argued that the transition from local use to federal management signaled the evolution of a new paradigm for managing the American landscape.

Gregg's second book, a co-edited anthology, American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Society, and the Land(Yale, 2011), traced the continuities and changes in agrarian thought. This volume presents a narrative of American development that transcends declensionist interpretations of rural change, and encourages a reconsideration of traditional portrayals of the changes in American rural life. This book is directed toward undergraduates and a popular audience, and it seeks to capitalize upon the current interest in sustainable agriculture and the politics of food to encourage a re-examination of the history of the American relationship with farming and rural land use.

Before arriving at the University of Kansas Gregg was an assistant professor of history at Iowa State University from 2004-2008. Between 2007-2010 she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, where she worked on the history of the system of rural credits in the United States. Part of the project archive can be found at http://www.farmcreditarchive.org.

A member of the faculty of the KU Program in Environmental Studies, Gregg also serves on the executive committee of the American Society for Environmental History, the board of directors of the Forest History Society, and is an associate editor of the journal Agricultural History.