Drop-in hours: by appointment only

John W. Jepsen is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Iowa, with research interests in Native American, energy, and public policy history. With the guidance of his advisor, Dr. Richard Tyler Priest, he is researching the development of federal Indian policy and mineral rights law in order to understand the relationship between regimes of economic and resource development and the effective exercise of sovereignty and self-determination by tribal governments.

Prior to coming to Iowa, Jepsen received his BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Montana. A former laborer in the oilfields of the Intermountain West, he is concerned with the toll extractive industries take on the rural and indigenous communities that are often the sites of intensive extraction. Since coming to Iowa he has taken part in the Obermann Center's Graduate Institute on Outreach and Engagement (Winter 2017), received a Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio Summer Fellowship where he worked on GIS mapping (Summer 2018), helped organize the 2018 Midwestern Labor and Working-Class History Colloquium with colleague Ashley Dorn (May 26th, 2019), worked with the Iowa Youth Writers Project to run a week-long oral history summer camp with colleague Aiden Bettine (Summer 2018), and presented research at the Energy and the Left Workshop at NYU (Spring 2019).

During the Spring 2020 Semester, Jepsen was on a Post-Comprehensive Exams Research Fellowship awarded by the University of Iowa's Graduate College.