Hayden Nelson

Hayden L. Nelson is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Kansas where he specializes in environmental and Indigenous history in the North American West. He studies historical environments in the contexts of capitalism, colonization, and climate change, and he is particularly interested in exploring how those historical forces and their legacies overlap with one another. He earned his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 2018 where he was a History major with minors in Ancient and American Indian Studies, as well as earning a Certificate from the university’s Ojibwe Language program. Hayden then earned his M.A. in History from the University of Montana, Missoula in Spring 2020. 

Hayden’s dissertation, tentatively titled “The North Woods: An Environmental History from the Pleistocene to the Pyrocene,” investigates how both human and non-human actors interacted with and transformed the transnational forested region of the western Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi watersheds from the end of the Wisconsin glaciation to the beginnings of industrial logging. He examines how those forests came to be over thousands of years after deglaciation, how human societies developed intricate lifeways as part of that environment, and how the processes of colonization, such as the fur trade and the expansion of industrial settlement, have transformed the forested environment. The environmental change in the North Woods is directly linked to, and oftentimes a product of, what he regards as settler extractivism. Through this lens, the North Woods becomes connected to more distant regions: the access and exploitation of North Woods resources occurred over hundreds of years before permanent white settlement arrived into the region slowly worked to undermine traditional Indigenous resource use. He will defend his dissertation in Spring 2025.

Hayden is an active member of the various communities to which he belongs. At the organizational level, he served as the Graduate Assistant for the Western History Association from January 2021 to December 2022, and he is currently serving in a one-year term as the Chair of the American Society for Environmental History’s Early Career Caucus. At the University of Kansas, he served as the Social Chair of the History Graduate Student Organization (HGSO) from 2023 to 2024.

For further information about Hayden and his work, please refer to his website: https://www.haydenlnelson.com

Advised by Andrew Isenberg