Linda Ivey (2003), Professor, and History Department Chair, California State University – East Bay. Linda wrote her dissertation on a farming community near Monterey in California (late 19th and 20th century).
George Vrtis (2006), Professor, Carleton College. George’s dissertation, “The Front Range of the Rocky Mountains: An Environmental History, 1700-1900,” won the Glassman Award for the best humanities dissertation at Georgetown. He is co-editor, with John McNeill, of Mining North America: An Environmental History since 1522 (University of California Press, 2017). Peter Engelke (2011), Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council. Peter’s dissertation was on city planning in Munich in the 1960s-1980s. Peter is the co-author with John McNeill of The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (2016). Marc Landry (2013), Joseph Logsdon Professor and Associate Director, Austria Center (Innsbruck), University of New Orleans. Marc’s dissertation dealt with hydroelectric development in the Alps, c. 1890-1960. Erin Stewart Mauldin (2014), John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida. Erin’s dissertation was on agriculture in the southern U.S. before, during, and after the Civil War. She received Georgetown’s 2016 Glassman Award for the best dissertation in the humanities. It was published in revised form as Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Oxford University Press (2018), which won the Wiley-Silver Prize in 2019. She also is co-editor, with John McNeill, of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Global Environmental History (2012, 2nd edition 2024). Chris Gratien (2015), Academy Scholar, Harvard University, 2016-17, and Assistant Professor of Environmental History, University of Virginia. Chris’s dissertation was on the Çukurova (c. 1850-1950), a coastal plain in southern Turkey. He is a co-creator of the Ottoman History Podcast network. His principal adviser was Dr. Judith Tucker. His revised dissertation appeared as The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2022). Elizabeth Williams (2015), Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Elizabeth’s dissertation was on efforts and discourses surrounding agricultural modernization in greater Syria, c. 1870-1940. Her principal adviser was Dr. Judith Tucker. Stanford University Press published her revised dissertation as States of Cultivation: Imperial Transition and Scientific Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean (2023). Graham Pitts (2016), Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi. Graham’s dissertation was on famine in twentieth-century Lebanon. He co-edited the University of Texas Press book, Making Levantine Cuisine (2021). Alan Roe (2016), wrote his dissertation on national parks and outdoor tourism in Soviet Russia. His book, Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. He also co-edited, together with John McNeill, Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (Routledge, 2012). Alan teaches high school history in northern Virginia. Meredith Denning (2018), wrote her dissertation about the United States and Canada’s transnational water management of the lower Great Lakes over the course of the twentieth century. She is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Faisal Husain (2018), Assistant Professor, Penn State. His dissertation examined the establishment of a unified Ottoman imperial regime over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the sixteenth century and the consequences of this political transition on the state, provincial settlements, and the environment. Oxford University Press published his revised dissertation as Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (2021). Robynne Mellor (2018), wrote her dissertation, “The Cold War Underground: An Environmental History of Uranium Mining in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union, 1945-1991,” on the ways in which access to uranium and diplomatic choices shaped landscapes and bodies in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union. Together with her husband Oliver Horn (another Georgetown History PhD), Robynne runs a historical consulting firm in Santa Fe, NM. Robert Shields Mevissen (2018), Assistant Professor, SUNY Old Westbury. His dissertation focused on hydraulic engineering projects on the Danube River, transnational networks, and civic engagement in the German and Hungarian-speaking halves of the late Habsburg Empire. His revised dissertation is under contract at the University of Pittsburgh Press as Constructing the Danube Empire: An Environmental History. He has also published in Water History (2020) and Austrian History Yearbook (2018). Clark L. Alejandrino (2019), Assistant Professor, Trinity College. Clark wrote his dissertation on typhoons in South China from the fifth century to the twentieth century. Matthew P. Johnson (2021), Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University Center for the Environment. He wrote his dissertation about Brazilian hydropower dams, 1960s-1990s, and the revised and abridged version of that manuscript is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is currently researching and writing a second book about Caribbean oil refineries, 1910s-2010s. Jackson Perry (2021), Visiting Scholar, George Washington University. His research focuses on the modern environmental history of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean region, in trans-regional and global perspectives. His dissertation, “The Gospel of the Gum: Eucalyptus Enthusiasm and the Modern Mediterranean World, 1848-1896,” received the Glassman Award for the best dissertation in the humanities at Georgetown. Jackson previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the New York Botanical Garden. Rob Christensen (2022), Visiting Assistant Professor, Gustavus Adolphus College. Rob wrote his dissertation, “Worlds in Conflict: Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Challenges, and the ‘Conquista del Desierto’ in the Making of Argentina, 1870-1900,” on the dispossession and resettlement of Indigenous groups in northern Patagonia and the Pampas. Articles based on this dissertation are forthcoming in the journals Ethnohistory and History Compass, and he is currently revising the dissertation into a book manuscript. Dylan Atchley Proctor (2022), completed his doctorate in historical epidemiology and environmental history with the thesis “Multidisciplinary Approaches to Infectious Disease History in Twentieth Century Africa,” innovating methods to rearticulate disease patterns in humans and non-human animals in African environmental history. In 2022, he became the first historian to serve as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer, more commonly referred to as disease detectives, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. |