Before joining the faculty at BYU he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, was visiting faculty at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and a historian and editor for the Joseph Smith Papers. He is the author of numerous historical articles, anthology chapters, and reviews on North American West, transnational borderlands, indigenous peoples, and comparative genocide studies. He co-authored A Historical Dictionary of the American Frontier (Rowman Littlefield, 2015) and will soon publish his forthcoming monograph Native but Foreign: Transnational Cree, Chippewa and Yaqui Refugees and Immigrants in the U.S-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1880-present (Texas A&M Press).