Please read below for the message from University of Washington History Department chair Glennys Young regarding the passing of Linda Nash: 

"It is with deep sadness and a heavy heart that I write to let you know that our colleague Linda Nash passed away early Sunday morning [October 17, 2021]. Our caring thoughts and deepest sympathy are with her husband, Jim Hanford, their children Helen and Peter, and the rest of their family. We mourn her passing.

Linda was a brilliant historian, an outstanding teacher, and a generous colleague. She earned her Ph.D. in History in 2000 from our Department, and worked with Richard White, John Findlay, and other members of our Department. She also held a B.S. in Civil Engineering and an MS in Energy and Resources.

Her prize-winning book, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease and Knowledge, was published by the University of California Press in 2007. It was awarded the the American Historical Association's John H. Dunning Prize, the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Prize, and the Western Association of Women Historian's Serra-Keller Prize. She also wrote prize-winning articles.

The book project she had been working on is, as Linda put it, is "The Materials of Empire: American Engineers in the West and Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley," under contract to Oxford University Press. This book tells an environmental and postcolonial history of development,” connecting the US’s approach to the postwar world to the nation’s settler colonial history in the American West, by demonstrating how the United States’ materially intensive approach to appropriating the dry landscapes of the trans-Mississippi West in the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries shaped American responses to dry regions across the world for several decades. Through a transnational study of two large American engineering projects, one domestic (the Columbia Basin Project in Washington State) and one foreign (the Helmand Valley Project in Afghanistan), The Materials of Empire emphasizes the centrality of natural environments and material flows to all aspects of modern life both within and beyond the borders of the US."

Her article, “The Nature of ‘Know-How’: American Engineers in Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley,” is forthcoming in Transplanting Modernity? New Histories of Poverty, Development, & Environments, ed. Thomas Robertson and Jenny Leigh Smith, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Linda's teaching of US Environmental History was legendary, and inspired her students, who included department colleagues who audited her courses. She was also an exceptionally generous departmental citizen.

It is my hope that we will soon be able to come together to remember and honor Linda's career, and life."   

With deepest sympathy,

Glennys Young
Chair, Department of History
Professor of International Studies
University of Washington