Amy Kohout joined the History department at Colorado College in 2016, after serving as Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Environmental Studies department at Davidson College during 2015-2016. She earned her B.A. in history from Yale University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She works on U.S. cultural and environmental history, and her research and teaching interests include the U.S. West, American empire, the Civil War and Reconstruction, museum studies, the history of natural history, and the craft of writing history.
At CC, Amy serves as a faculty affiliate to the Environmental Studies and Science Program and the Southwest Studies Program. She contributes to thematic minors in Museum Studies and Indigenous Studies.
Amy’s first book, Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers was published in 2023 by the University of Nebraska Press, as part of their new Many Wests series. In 2020-21, she held the David J. Weber Fellowship for the Study of Southwestern America at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. She is a 2022-2024 participant in the Bright Institute at Knox College.
Her work has been published in Museum History, Sustainability Science, Rethinking History, The Appendix, and A Companion to the History of American Science. Amy has worked on public-facing, collaborative projects centering historical research and writing; she was a co-founder of Backlist, a digital site where historians recommend books they love, and before that she served as an editor at The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history. She currently coordinates a summer fellowship program for CC History majors in collaboration with the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.
