Associate Director and Cecil D. Andrus Endowed Chair for the Environment and Public Lands, School of the Environment Resilience Institute

Emily Wakild is a publicly-engaged environmental historian and professor. She serves as the Cecil D. Andrus Endowed Chair for the Environment and Public Lands in the School of the Environment at Boise State.  She earned a BA in History and Politics from Willamette University in 1999 and a PhD in History from the University of Arizona in 2007. She joined the faculty of the Department of History at Boise State University in 2012 and directed the Environmental Studies program from 2018 to 2023, when she helped design the School of the Environment.

Emily is the author of seven books and translations and more than 30 academic articles, largely about nature conservation in the Americas. Her most recent book, A Moderating Force: Conserving Nature in National Parks in Patagonia and Amazonia (Oxford, 2026), argues that the ubiquity of nature conservation comes from its modest goals and wide utility. With María González Cárdenas, she edited Nosotras: Latinas in Idaho, which is a bilingual collection of 50 biographies from Mexican descent women in Idaho. Her first monograph, Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico’s National Parks (University of Arizona Press, 2011), examined the creation of national parks during Mexico’s social revolution and has been used by policymakers to improve conservation outcomes. The book won three academic awards and was translated and published in Mexico.

Emily’s academic work has earned awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hays program. She is currently the PI on a $496,914 NSF-Innovations in Graduate Education grant to study the effectiveness of place-based education as a way to confront challenges in contemporary environmental management. Entitled PLACE: Partnerships for Learning through Academic and Community Engagement, this project aims to study the role of experiential learning in enhancing the persistence, satisfaction, and placement of graduate students from interdisciplinary graduate degree programs in public lands and environmental management careers.