Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and Professor of History at Brigham Young University. His 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 from the Western Writers of America. 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. In 2022, Rensink published the edited collection, The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). 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 of 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 Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast. Rensink serves as series editor for the new Histories of the North American West series with the University of New Mexico Press. He is currently working on projects on transnational Indigenous histories and Western environmental history. Prof. Rensink can be found online at www.bwrensink.org or http://www.twitter.com/brendenwrensink.
Classes
- HIST 220: The United States Through 1877
- HIST 221: The United States Since 1877
- HIST 387: American Indian History from 1877 to the Present
- HIST 490: Capstone Research Seminar
- AM ST 392R: Western American Lecture Series
- AM ST 301: Western American Studies Seminar
- AM ST 490: Senior Capstone
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