Taylor Rose, Ph.D.

Taylor Rose is a historian of the United States and Native North America from the 1840s to the present with a focus on public lands, natural resource extraction, militarization, and environmental justice.

His current book project, Battle Born: Nevada and the Militarized West, examines the enduring relationship between national defense initiatives, extractive infrastructure development, the dispossession of Native lands, and the transformation of arid environments in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert. His work has been funded by the American Historical Association, NASA, the Huntington Library, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). His writing has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Zócalo Public Square, and AHA Perspectives Daily. In addition to the book, Taylor’s current projects include a bibliography of desert histories, a study of critical minerals from the 1850s to today, and a journal article about the Nevada Senator Pat McCarran’s airborne imperial vision for developing the Intermountain West.

In the past, Taylor has studied the historical geography of logging roads in the Pacific Northwest and the politics of noise pollution in 1960s New York. You can read his article, “The Opening of the Clackamas: Log Trucks, Access Roads, and Multiple-Use Infrastructure in Oregon’s National Forests,” in the May 2022 issue of the Western Historical Quarterly, as well as a forthcoming entry in the Oregon Encyclopedia on the Clackamas Wilderness southeast of Portland. Both are based on his Master's thesis.

At UAS, Taylor teaches courses in U.S. history and world history, incorporating new research from Indigenous studies, the environmental humanities, and histories of infrastructure into his lessons. If you’re a student or prospective student, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Taylor was born in San Diego, California and grew up in Orlando, Florida. After college in Gainesville, Florida, he had the opportunity to work in historic preservation in San Francisco, Denver, and Portland, Oregon. He spent the last seven years in New Haven, Connecticut, getting his Ph.D. at Yale University, before moving to Ketchikan with his wife, Monica, and their pet cat, Willie. He is an avid cyclist, hiker, runner, and camper and once spent a long summer as a wildland firefighter in Colorado.