Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. For 2020-2023 he is the Marjorie Pay Hinckley Young Scholar for the FHSS College at BYU. His recent monograph, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (Connecting the Greater West Series, Texas A&M University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book. His co-edited anthology, Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (University of Utah Press, 2019), won the 2019 Metcalfe Best Anthology Book Award from the John Whitmer Historical Association. Rensink is also co-editor of Documents Vol. 4, and Documents Vol. 6 of the award-winning Joseph Smith Papers project (Church Historians Press, 2016, 2017), co-author of the Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and author multiple articles, book chapters, and reviews. Rensink helps manage events, programming, awards, and research at the BYU Redd Center. He created and directs two ongoing public history initiatives for the Redd Center: serving as the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast. He is currently editing a collection of essays on 21st-Century West History, working on projects on transnational Indigenous histories, a monograph on cultural and environmental history of Western American wilderness experience, and multiple local environmental and photography projects in the San Rafael Swell, broader Great Basin, and along the Wasatch Front. Prof. Rensink can be found online at www.bwrensink.org or http://www.twitter.com/brendenwrensink.
Classes
- Hist 221: The United States Since 1877
- HIST 220: The United States Through 1877
- AM ST 392RL: American Studies Lecture Series: Presentations on American Studies/Western American Studies
- AM ST 301: Western American Studies Seminar
Publications
- The Joseph Smith Papers Documents, Volume 6: February 1838-August 1839
- The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 4: April 1834-September 1835
- Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier
- Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands
- Essays on American Indian and Mormon History