Brenden W. Rensink

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. In 2022 he published an edited collection entitled, "The North American West in the Twenty-First Century", (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). 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. Rensink was 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 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 the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast. He is currently writing new cultural and environmental history how Western American wilderness and landscapes have been experienced, perceived, and utilized for adventure and recreation, among other projects.