Andrew Hoyt is a first-year PhD student with interests spanning the histories of the life and environmental sciences, US environmental and political history, and North American Indigenous history. His research currently focuses on the political dimensions of ecology and other forms of environmental expertise in the United States. Working across political scales, he seeks to characterize the influence of environmental knowledge and knowledge-holders on both major trends in American environmental governance and specific federal, state, and tribal management contexts.

Andrew has written on such topics as the politics of Ojibwe resource management, the development of the field of resource economics, and the relationship between plant-ecological concepts and conservation practices in the United States. His MA thesis, “Ecology, Settler Colonialism, and the Environments of the American Midwest: The Science and Politics of Ecological Restoration since 1950” examines the emergence of ecological restoration as a concept, research agenda, and set of practices since the mid-twentieth century. The thesis demonstrates that, as the logic of restoration has come to dominate environmental management in the Midwest, restoration practices have shaped public agencies and settler-Indigenous relations as well as material environmental conditions in the region.

Before starting at Princeton, Andrew graduated magna cum laude from Carleton College with a B.A. in History and a background in ecological research. He went on to work as an energy analyst and climate policy advocate in Minneapolis for several years before completing an M.A. in History at Trent University in Ontario.