Benjamin H. Johnson is a specialist in both borderlands and environmental history.  He collaborated with photographer Jeffrey Gusky on Bordertown:  The Odyssey of An American Place (2008) and is the author of Revolution in Texas:  How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (2003).  Ben organized the 2006-7 Clements Symposium, Bridging National Borders in North America, with former Clements Center Fellow Andrew Graybill. The resulting book of essays was published by Duke University Press under the same title last spring.  His other publications include the edited volumes
 Making of the American West:  People and Perspectives and Steal This University:  The Labor Movement and the Corporatization of Higher Education, as well as numerous articles and chapters on environmental history.  Along with former Clements Center Fellow Pekka Hämäläinen, he is in the process of editing Major Problems in North American Borderlands History.  A native of Houston, Ben received his B.A. from Carleton College and his Ph.D. from Yale University.  He arrived at SMU in the fall of 2002, after a post doctoral fellowship at Caltech and teaching for a year at the University of Texas at San Antonio.  Johnson has received fellowships from the Beinecke Library, the Mellon Foundation, the Marshall Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  At SMU he served as the interim director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies through May 2011 and was an associate professor in the Clements Department of History. He is currently at work on a history of the Progressive-Era environmental politics for Yale University Press.