Voyles received her PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2010, and was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests revolve around environmental justice, environmental history, race, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (University of Minnesota Press, May 2015), which explores the history of uranium mining as a process of “wastelanding,” a racial and spatial process of rendering an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Her current research explores the environmental history of the Salton Sea. Her ACTI sponsored project will allow her to develop crucial themes in the project that touch on both Catholic teachings about environmentalism and social justice, and the relationship between the Catholic Church and Native Nations in California history.