Her fields of study include food and culture, U.S. environmental history, material and visual culture, and race and ethnicity studies. Her first book, Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon, was published with William Cronon’s Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books at the University of Washington Press in 2012. Her current project Biscuits and Buffalo: Squashing Myths about Food in Indian Country looks at the ways Plains Indians have created food traditions in the twentieth-century that support a sense of American Indian identity. Cindy has a long career in public humanities and continues to curate exhibitions. She is currently the President of the Society of Fellows at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany and an executive board member of the American Society for Environmental History.