Jared Farmer is the Walter Annenberg H. Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West. His recent work has turned to global environmental history across the modern period.

Originally from Provo, Utah, Farmer earned his degrees from Utah State University, the University of Montana, and Stanford.

His book On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Harvard, 2008) won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best-written non-fiction book on an American theme, a literary award that honors the “union of the historian and the artist.” His subsequent book, Trees in Paradise: A California History (Norton, 2013), won the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best book on the history of Native and/or settler peoples in frontier, border, and borderland zones of intercultural contact in any century to the present. His new book, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books, 2022; Picador UK, 2023), has been reviewed in Nature, Science, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Review of Books, among other outlets.

His current project is collaborative: a GIS-based digital history of the lower Schuylkill River petrochemical corridor. His three long-term book projects are “God View: How Seeing Earth Changed Humanity” (a meditation on aerial technologies of seeing); “Vicarious Records” (a metahistory of family); and “The Everlasting Stone Age” (a cultural history of rocks).

In October 2023, Farmer will be delivering the 28th annual Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture in Logan, Utah; his presentation will be called “Music & the Unspoken Truth.”

This program will be livestreamed, but will not be available to view later.