About me

Hi! I’m Jason, a web developer by trade and a historian by vocation at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University. I collaborate with faculty and graduate students on the innovative application of technology in teaching and research across interactive data visualization, design, and public and digital history. I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and currently split my time between Lincoln and Fairfax.

Currently, I am the Senior Developer/Scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Adjunct Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, and an Affiliate Fellow at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

You can find my full CV here.

(Need a full bio?)

A summary, more or less, of this blog’s themes can be found here.

Because we live in an era of climate emergency, most of my work is concerned with land, water, and energy, and the history tied up within these: who controlled access to these things; how were these things owned and used; what stories do we tell about places and how does that shape what happened; how the landscape is a record of history and power; how state institutions shape thinking about landscape, nature, and health. In addition to my work in environmental history, I’m also a scholar with expertise in digital mapping, spatial history, statistics, and big-data / machine reading methods for historical research.

For the past decade, I’ve been designing, developing, and teaching digital history at various institutions including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Stanford University, and George Mason University. In 2020, I helped co-edit the award-winning Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy.

In addition to my work in digital history, I am an environmental historian of the twentieth century North American West, Great Plains, and Canadian Prairies. In 2024 I published Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High Tech Urbanism, where I explore how rapid urban change in the years after World War II reshaped the Valley—its politics, its environment, its physical space. I’ve also published on Custer and Little Bighorn, South Dakota politics, and data preservation. Currently, I have several large writing projects on-going, in order of the attention they’re currently receiving: a new regional history of the Sagebrush Rebellion; a biography of the Murie brothers; a new biography of Wallace Stegner; and an environmental history of the Platte River.

While I work at George Mason University, this blog, like the rest of my writing and public expressions, should not be taken as a representation of my university’s views.

Contact

Please feel free to contact me: jason@jasonheppler.org

Privacy

I take your privacy seriously. I use a lightweight and privacy-centric tracker called Plausible, which interprets information your browser already sends (like IP address, screen resolution, browser, and operating system.) If you’re running Do Not Track on your browser, Plausible won’t track you.

If you email me something I keep that anonymous, especially when sent encrypted. If I decide I would like to quote something from your email, I will ask you first. If you’ve emailed me about something I got wrong, I may use your name to credit the correction but I won’t if it’s not public information.

Colophon

This website is built with the static site generator Hugo. The blog runs on micro.blog. This is a low impact website.

Support

If you’d like to support my writing here and elsewhere, I’d love it if you could buy me a coffee.

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