Amanda Katz

2026 Undergraduate Faculty Mentor of the Year Award Nominee

College of Arts & Sciences | History, Cultures, and Ideas

Amanda Katz is an Assistant Professor of U.S. History specializing in science, technology, culture, and environment. Within these fields, she focuses primarily on rural and municipal infrastructure, transportation, and mobility. Her current research project explores the development of American highway engineering in the early twentieth century. As an applied historian, Katz serves as a faculty researcher for USU’s Advancing Self-sufficiency through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification (ASPIRE) Engineering Research Center. The ASPIRE Engineering Research Center is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Generation 4 ERC that conducts vital research and development for widespread adoption of electrified transportation. As a 2025-2026 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Greece, Katz will teach both graduate and undergraduate courses in the histories of science and technology, with special emphasis on examining continuities among Ottoman, Byzantine, and Islamic empires. Furthermore, in collaboration with her colleagues at the University of Crete, she will offer workshops and provide public lectures on matters of transportation infrastructures in peripheral or insular island communities, and will conduct research at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies on the relationship between terrestrial and maritime transportation systems of the Saronic Gulf Islands and the formation of local economies and cultural heritage. Katz earned her PhD in American History from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.