Teaching:
Dr. Brosnan's undergraduate courses include the Environment in U.S. History, the American West, and the Progressive Era, as well as the second half of the U.S. survey. She teaches graduate courses in U.S. and World Environmental History. An active participant in the UH Public History graduate program, Dr. Brosnan has taught its research seminar and introduced a new course in Historical Editing. Dr. Brosnan is the Research Director of the U.H. Center for Public History.
Research:
Dr. Brosnan's first book, Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental change Along the Front Range (2002) examines the integration of diverse and distant hinterlands into the Denver-based, regional economic system following the discovery of gold.
Dr. Brosnan is writing a book tentatively titled, Napa Vines: An Environmental History of America's Premier Wine Region that explores the role of the industry, the state and the consumer in defining the use of natural resources in the valley. This book is the first in a contemplated three-part series. The second book will examine wine regions in the United States, Canada, Chile, and Australia and contemplate "Old World" viticulture in the "New World" as a form of ecological imperialism and cultural colonization. The third book will explore the role of U.S. land grant institutions in the development of food products and consider the cultural and environmental impacts of those products.
Dr. Brosnan also is editing the four-volume Encyclopedia of American Environmental History (Facts On File, forthcoming 2007). As a definitive reference work in the field, the encyclopedia will use some 800 entries to retell traditional historical narratives from an environmental perspective while injecting what are typically perceived as "envirnmental" issues into that narrative. UH Professors, Martin Melosi and Joseph Pratt, are the associate editors.
Dr. Brosnan also is co-editing with Amy Scott a collection of essays, tentatively titled Country Dreams and City Schemes: Utopian Visions of the Twentieth-Century American West.
Selected Publications:
Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law and Environmental Change Along the Front Range (University of New Mexico, 2002).
"'Vin d'Etat': Consumers, Land, and the State in California's Napa Valley," in Wine, Society, and Globalization: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Wine Industry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
"Dixie Cups and Agricultural Sustainability in California's Napa Valley," Frontieres (Presses Universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne), January 2006, 57-69.
"Public Presence, Public Silence: Nuns, Bishops and the Gendered Space of Chicago," The Catholic Historical Review, July 2004, 473-96.
"Effluence , Affluence, and the Maturing of Urban Environmental History," Journal of Urban History, November 2004, 115-23.
Frontier in American Culture: Curriculum Materials (Newberry Library, 1994).
