Faculty
Dagomar Degroot
Dagomar Degroot bridges the humanities and the sciences to explore how societies have thrived - or suffered - in the face of dramatic changes to the natural world. His new book, The Frigid Golden Age (Cambridge University Press) explains how one society - the Dutch Republic - thrived as others faltered when Earth's climate cooled between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently working on two new book projects. The first, Civilization and the Cosmos (Harvard University Press/Viking UK) traces how environmental changes in outer space helped shape the course of human history, and how humanity has started to reshape environments beyond Earth. The second, War of the Whales, explores relationships between climate change, resource exploitation, and conflict in the seventeenth-century Arctic. While working on these and other projects, Professor Degroot teaches courses on topics that include the Little Ice Age, global warming, the Anthropocene, the environmental history of outer space, big history, and early modern violence. Degroot is the founder and director of HistoricalClimatology.com, a website that receives more than 500,000 hits annually. He is also the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network, an organization of nearly 200 academics in humanistic and scientific disciplines. He founded and hosts the Climate History Podcast, and founded Climate Tipping Points, a new project that aims to introduce a broad audience to the local consequences of climate change.
Kathryn de Luna
Kathryn de Luna studies early African History, adapting archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data to the historian’s archive. Her research has explored the connections between political culture and changing practices in and on the environment. Her first book, Collecting Food, Cultivating People (Yale, 2016) explores the histories of subsistence over the last three thousand years in central Africa and won the Agricultural History Society’s Wallace Award and was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She is currently working on two projects. The first explores the relationship between mobility and climate in medieval central Africa by combining language evidence with new archaeological excavation and survey as well as various methods from the archaeological sciences and biogeochemistry to reconstruct individual migration biographies and fire events for a period and place where we rare have such micro-scale data on environmental history. The second project traces the interconnected histories of pyrotechnology, politics, senses, and emotions in central Africa over the last three thousand years.
Meredith McKittrick
Meredith McKittrick is a historian of Southern Africa with interests in dryland environments, water, and agriculture. She received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD from Stanford University, and has been at Georgetown since 1996. After completing her first book on generational and gender relationships in colonial Namibia, Meredith became a convert to environmental history. Her articles have appeared in Environmental History, History of Meteorology, the Journal of African History, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. She teaches courses on sub-Saharan Africa, environmental history, comparative race studies, and settler colonialism, and has directed the History Department’s MA program for the past four years. In 2018-19, she’ll be a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, completing a book on popular ideas about climate, water and environment in early 20th-century southern Africa
John McNeill
John McNeill was born and raised in Chicago and remains passionately devoted to the professional sports teams of the Windy City. He earned, or at any rate was awarded, a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Duke University. Since 1985 he has cheerfully served two masters, as a faculty member of the School of Foreign Service and History Department at Georgetown. From 2003 until 2006 he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs, until his appointment as University Professor. He teaches world history, environmental history, and international history at Georgetown; and writes books, and directs PhD students, mainly in environmental history. His most recent book, co-authored with his former PhD student Peter Engelke, is The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. He is a former president of the American Society for Environmental History and in 2019 will serve as president of the American Historical Association. He lives an agreeably harried existence with his triathlete wife and their four exuberant children. If he had time, he would enjoy hiking, tennis, basketball, and travel.
Timothy Newfield
Tim Newfield is an environmental historian and historical epidemiologist. After defending his doctoral thesis in History and Classical Studies at McGill University in 2011, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Michigan (History), Stirling (Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy) and Princeton (History & the Environmental Institute). He teaches medieval, environmental, and medical history, and most recently led a seminar on the global history of Yersinia pestis (from 3000BCE to last year). Tim joined Georgetown University as an Assistant Professor in History and Biology in Spring 2017. His recent work has focused on human-bovine plagues and the measles-rinderpest divergence in Eurasia in the first millennium CE and on the prevalence of Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium malariae malaria in early post-classical Europe. Current work looks at the history of short-term/rapid climate change and food shortage in the Frankish period and the 376-386 bovine panzootic, an (allegedly) intercontinental cattle plague that seems not to have occurred. He completed a synthesis of the historical and palaeoclimatic scholarship on the 535-550 global climatic downturn for the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Climate History a short while ago. His papers have appeared in Agricultural History Review (2009), Argos (2012), Early Medieval Europe (2017), Geology (2017), Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2015, 2017), Journal of Roman Archaeology (2017), Post-Classical Archaeologies (2015), Royal Society Open Society (2017) and edited volumes (2012, 2013, 2013, forthcoming) focused on various aspects of premodern health, environment and economy. At present, he is finishing the re-write of his doctoral thesis on subsistence crises, epidemics and epizootics in Carolingian Europe, co-editing a three-volume handbook for Brill on medieval environmental history, and leading a multi-author study on European mortality events between the Justinianic Plague and Black Death. He also co-leads the Climate Change and History Research Initiative (cchri.princeton.edu) at Princeton University. His next projects are collaborative and multidisciplinary. Both investigate the impact of climate change on disease landscapes in premodernity. The first looks at how the Medieval Climatic Anomaly and the rise of the Mongol Empire altered the pathogenic load of European and West Asian livestock. The second considers the influence of falling summer temperatures in the Late Antique Little Ice Age on the occurrence of Y. pestis and malaria in western Eurasia.
Dagomar Degroot bridges the humanities and the sciences to explore how societies have thrived - or suffered - in the face of dramatic changes to the natural world. His new book, The Frigid Golden Age (Cambridge University Press) explains how one society - the Dutch Republic - thrived as others faltered when Earth's climate cooled between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is currently working on two new book projects. The first, Civilization and the Cosmos (Harvard University Press/Viking UK) traces how environmental changes in outer space helped shape the course of human history, and how humanity has started to reshape environments beyond Earth. The second, War of the Whales, explores relationships between climate change, resource exploitation, and conflict in the seventeenth-century Arctic. While working on these and other projects, Professor Degroot teaches courses on topics that include the Little Ice Age, global warming, the Anthropocene, the environmental history of outer space, big history, and early modern violence. Degroot is the founder and director of HistoricalClimatology.com, a website that receives more than 500,000 hits annually. He is also the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network, an organization of nearly 200 academics in humanistic and scientific disciplines. He founded and hosts the Climate History Podcast, and founded Climate Tipping Points, a new project that aims to introduce a broad audience to the local consequences of climate change.
Kathryn de Luna
Kathryn de Luna studies early African History, adapting archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data to the historian’s archive. Her research has explored the connections between political culture and changing practices in and on the environment. Her first book, Collecting Food, Cultivating People (Yale, 2016) explores the histories of subsistence over the last three thousand years in central Africa and won the Agricultural History Society’s Wallace Award and was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. She is currently working on two projects. The first explores the relationship between mobility and climate in medieval central Africa by combining language evidence with new archaeological excavation and survey as well as various methods from the archaeological sciences and biogeochemistry to reconstruct individual migration biographies and fire events for a period and place where we rare have such micro-scale data on environmental history. The second project traces the interconnected histories of pyrotechnology, politics, senses, and emotions in central Africa over the last three thousand years.
Meredith McKittrick
Meredith McKittrick is a historian of Southern Africa with interests in dryland environments, water, and agriculture. She received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD from Stanford University, and has been at Georgetown since 1996. After completing her first book on generational and gender relationships in colonial Namibia, Meredith became a convert to environmental history. Her articles have appeared in Environmental History, History of Meteorology, the Journal of African History, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. She teaches courses on sub-Saharan Africa, environmental history, comparative race studies, and settler colonialism, and has directed the History Department’s MA program for the past four years. In 2018-19, she’ll be a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, completing a book on popular ideas about climate, water and environment in early 20th-century southern Africa
John McNeill
John McNeill was born and raised in Chicago and remains passionately devoted to the professional sports teams of the Windy City. He earned, or at any rate was awarded, a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Duke University. Since 1985 he has cheerfully served two masters, as a faculty member of the School of Foreign Service and History Department at Georgetown. From 2003 until 2006 he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental and International Affairs, until his appointment as University Professor. He teaches world history, environmental history, and international history at Georgetown; and writes books, and directs PhD students, mainly in environmental history. His most recent book, co-authored with his former PhD student Peter Engelke, is The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. He is a former president of the American Society for Environmental History and in 2019 will serve as president of the American Historical Association. He lives an agreeably harried existence with his triathlete wife and their four exuberant children. If he had time, he would enjoy hiking, tennis, basketball, and travel.
Timothy Newfield
Tim Newfield is an environmental historian and historical epidemiologist. After defending his doctoral thesis in History and Classical Studies at McGill University in 2011, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the universities of Michigan (History), Stirling (Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy) and Princeton (History & the Environmental Institute). He teaches medieval, environmental, and medical history, and most recently led a seminar on the global history of Yersinia pestis (from 3000BCE to last year). Tim joined Georgetown University as an Assistant Professor in History and Biology in Spring 2017. His recent work has focused on human-bovine plagues and the measles-rinderpest divergence in Eurasia in the first millennium CE and on the prevalence of Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium malariae malaria in early post-classical Europe. Current work looks at the history of short-term/rapid climate change and food shortage in the Frankish period and the 376-386 bovine panzootic, an (allegedly) intercontinental cattle plague that seems not to have occurred. He completed a synthesis of the historical and palaeoclimatic scholarship on the 535-550 global climatic downturn for the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Climate History a short while ago. His papers have appeared in Agricultural History Review (2009), Argos (2012), Early Medieval Europe (2017), Geology (2017), Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2015, 2017), Journal of Roman Archaeology (2017), Post-Classical Archaeologies (2015), Royal Society Open Society (2017) and edited volumes (2012, 2013, 2013, forthcoming) focused on various aspects of premodern health, environment and economy. At present, he is finishing the re-write of his doctoral thesis on subsistence crises, epidemics and epizootics in Carolingian Europe, co-editing a three-volume handbook for Brill on medieval environmental history, and leading a multi-author study on European mortality events between the Justinianic Plague and Black Death. He also co-leads the Climate Change and History Research Initiative (cchri.princeton.edu) at Princeton University. His next projects are collaborative and multidisciplinary. Both investigate the impact of climate change on disease landscapes in premodernity. The first looks at how the Medieval Climatic Anomaly and the rise of the Mongol Empire altered the pathogenic load of European and West Asian livestock. The second considers the influence of falling summer temperatures in the Late Antique Little Ice Age on the occurrence of Y. pestis and malaria in western Eurasia.
Graduate Students
Clark Alejandrino works on the environmental history of late imperial and modern China, especially climate and animal history. He came to Georgetown in 2012. He is currently writing a dissertation about typhoons on the south China coast from the fifth to the twentieth century. He is also broadly interested in East Asian and World history while seeking to bring a diversity of perspectives from the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences into his work. His research has been supported by funding from the Luce Foundation, ACLS, the Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library of Taiwan, SSRC, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. Before coming to Georgetown, Clark finished his BA in history at Ateneo de Manila University and an MA in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney.
Meredith Denning focuses on transboundary water management and interdisciplinary research. She studies how the United States and Canada cooperated to transform the Great Lakes during the twentieth century. In particular, she wants to know how residents, scientists and local governments got involved in managing the Lakes they lived by, and how international relations altered the Great Lakes watershed. If she can discover how the many, many interested groups learned to take better care of the water they share, perhaps she can help continue the process. Her work has been supported by a Hackman Residency at the New York State Archives and the Georgetown Environment Initiative. Meredith entered the PhD program in 2010.
Faisal Husain joined the PhD program in 2012. His dissertation, “Flows of Power: The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, 1546-1831,” examines the establishment of a unified Ottoman imperial regime over the Tigris and Euphrates and the consequences of this political transition on the state, streamside communities, and the environment. In 2018, he will be finishing and defending his dissertation with support from a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Faisal has an MA in history from Yale University and currently serves on the editorial board of Global Environment.
Publications:
Matthew Johnson joined the PhD program in 2015. He studies twentieth century Latin American environmental history with emphases on water and energy. His dissertation will look at the environmental and social consequences that surround dams built for hydroelectric power in Brazil during the second half of the twentieth century. These dams and their associated consequences will be considered in the context of global energy and the search for alternatives to fossil fuel-based energy regimes.
Conference and Invited Seminar Participation:
Robynne Mellor moved from her home in Canada in 2011 to begin her PhD at Georgetown. Her research focuses on the intersection of the environment and the Cold War. Her dissertation, which she is currently writing, comparatively examines the environmental history of uranium mining and milling in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1985. Robynne's work explores the history of the environmental and health effects of uranium mining, how the three countries conceptualized the environment in relation to waging the Cold War, and the role of uranium itself in the history of its procurement. She recently published a chapter, "A Comparative Case Study of Uranium Mine and Mill Tailings Regulation in Canada and the United States," in J.R. McNeill and John Vrtis (eds.) Mining North America: An Environmental History since 1522. In Fall 2017, she wrote and taught a course, "The Global Environmental History of the Cold War," for which her students produced a map of the environmental effects of the conflict. She is a frequent contributor to the Network in Canadian History and Environment blog, and the New Scholars representative for the organization. She is the editor of this website. Robynne's dissertation research has been supported by awards from the American Society for Environmental History, the SSRC and the SSHRC. When not writing or teaching, Robynne is very likely playing in the kitchen.
Natascha Otoya joined the PhD program in 2017. Her research focuses on the development of the oil industry in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century. She is particularly interested in human/nature interactions and how different groups, like politicians and scientists, viewed such interactions. Additionally, her research interests overlap with the field of history of science, as geology is a central element in the search and exploration of petroleum in Brazil, and she hopes to further develop collaborations with this branch of the natural sciences. Before coming to Georgetown, Natascha completed a Master's degree in Social History at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. Non-academic interests include cycling, swimming in the ocean and a new-found love for yoga.
Conference Participation:
José Carlos Pons Ballesteros is an environmental filmmaker and scholar, he joined the PhD program in 2016. His research focuses in understanding the connections between social and environmental justice from a long-term interdisciplinary perspective. Methodologically, José integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with analytical techniques drawn from ecology, geography, and history. His area interests include Mexico, Greece, and Madagascar. In addition, José is a graduate fellow at the Georgetown Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and he currently serves as the communications chair for the Georgetown Provost’s Diversity Advisory Committee. Before joining the program, José earned a master's degree in environmental science from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Publications:
Jackson Perry joined the PhD program in 2014. His research examines the spread of the eucalyptus tree genus to the Mediterranean region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He focuses on the politics and science of forestry in modern Europe and the Middle East, the emergence of transregional scientific networks and institutions, and the place of large-scale forest transformations in the onset of the Anthropocene. His research has been supported by research grants from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the Forest History Society. Before coming to Georgetown, Jackson completed a master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies at New York University. When he isn't reading about forests, Jackson is probably jogging in Rock Creek Park.
Hillar Schwertner joined the PhD program in 2013. His research examines the transnational water history of the California borderlands since 1848. He is especially interested in the development, distribution, and consumption of limited water resources in the transborder metropolis of "Tijuandiego"--the largest and most economically significant of more than a dozen transborder cities that transcend the political boundary. His dissertation seeks to show how the pursuit of this precious commodity has driven the development of a new urban frontier, and how its scarcity might threaten the growth of the region into the future. Before joining the PhD program, Hillar completed a master's degree in Global, International & Comparative History at Georgetown University.
Conference Participation:
Meredith Denning focuses on transboundary water management and interdisciplinary research. She studies how the United States and Canada cooperated to transform the Great Lakes during the twentieth century. In particular, she wants to know how residents, scientists and local governments got involved in managing the Lakes they lived by, and how international relations altered the Great Lakes watershed. If she can discover how the many, many interested groups learned to take better care of the water they share, perhaps she can help continue the process. Her work has been supported by a Hackman Residency at the New York State Archives and the Georgetown Environment Initiative. Meredith entered the PhD program in 2010.
Faisal Husain joined the PhD program in 2012. His dissertation, “Flows of Power: The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, 1546-1831,” examines the establishment of a unified Ottoman imperial regime over the Tigris and Euphrates and the consequences of this political transition on the state, streamside communities, and the environment. In 2018, he will be finishing and defending his dissertation with support from a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Faisal has an MA in history from Yale University and currently serves on the editorial board of Global Environment.
Publications:
- “Changes in the Euphrates River: Ecology and Politics in a Rural Ottoman Periphery, 1687-1702,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 47, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 1-25.
- “In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad,” Environmental History 19, no. 4 (2014): 638-664.
Matthew Johnson joined the PhD program in 2015. He studies twentieth century Latin American environmental history with emphases on water and energy. His dissertation will look at the environmental and social consequences that surround dams built for hydroelectric power in Brazil during the second half of the twentieth century. These dams and their associated consequences will be considered in the context of global energy and the search for alternatives to fossil fuel-based energy regimes.
Conference and Invited Seminar Participation:
- "The Energy Crisis and the South American Pharaohs: Brazil's Large Dams and the Social and Environmental Costs of Renewable Energy, 1973-1989." Tercera Escuela de Posgrado de la Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental (SOLCHA), Anápolis, Goiás, Brazil, Oct. 2017.
- "Swampy Sugar Lands: Irrigation Dams and the Rise and Fall of Malaria in Puerto Rico, 1898-1962." International Water History Association, Grand Rapids, MI, June 2017.
- "'Thirsty Sugar Lands': Dam Building and Irrigation in Southeastern Puerto Rico, 1898-1935." Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, PR, August 2016.
Robynne Mellor moved from her home in Canada in 2011 to begin her PhD at Georgetown. Her research focuses on the intersection of the environment and the Cold War. Her dissertation, which she is currently writing, comparatively examines the environmental history of uranium mining and milling in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1985. Robynne's work explores the history of the environmental and health effects of uranium mining, how the three countries conceptualized the environment in relation to waging the Cold War, and the role of uranium itself in the history of its procurement. She recently published a chapter, "A Comparative Case Study of Uranium Mine and Mill Tailings Regulation in Canada and the United States," in J.R. McNeill and John Vrtis (eds.) Mining North America: An Environmental History since 1522. In Fall 2017, she wrote and taught a course, "The Global Environmental History of the Cold War," for which her students produced a map of the environmental effects of the conflict. She is a frequent contributor to the Network in Canadian History and Environment blog, and the New Scholars representative for the organization. She is the editor of this website. Robynne's dissertation research has been supported by awards from the American Society for Environmental History, the SSRC and the SSHRC. When not writing or teaching, Robynne is very likely playing in the kitchen.
Natascha Otoya joined the PhD program in 2017. Her research focuses on the development of the oil industry in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century. She is particularly interested in human/nature interactions and how different groups, like politicians and scientists, viewed such interactions. Additionally, her research interests overlap with the field of history of science, as geology is a central element in the search and exploration of petroleum in Brazil, and she hopes to further develop collaborations with this branch of the natural sciences. Before coming to Georgetown, Natascha completed a Master's degree in Social History at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. Non-academic interests include cycling, swimming in the ocean and a new-found love for yoga.
Conference Participation:
- "Oil, politics and science: the development of oil geology in Brazil" at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting /Seattle, Oct 2017.
José Carlos Pons Ballesteros is an environmental filmmaker and scholar, he joined the PhD program in 2016. His research focuses in understanding the connections between social and environmental justice from a long-term interdisciplinary perspective. Methodologically, José integrates ethnographic tools from anthropology with analytical techniques drawn from ecology, geography, and history. His area interests include Mexico, Greece, and Madagascar. In addition, José is a graduate fellow at the Georgetown Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and he currently serves as the communications chair for the Georgetown Provost’s Diversity Advisory Committee. Before joining the program, José earned a master's degree in environmental science from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Publications:
- Pons, José C. Book Review: The Social Metabolism: A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change. Journal of Industrial Ecology (May 2017).
- Bouwmeester, René, Georgios Kerametsidis, Sofia Maniatakou and José C. Pons. First Integrated Marine Ecological Assessment of Samothraki. Sustainable Mediterranean. Special Issue, No. 73 (Dec 2016).
- Powell, Jon, José C. Pons, Marian Chertow. Waste Informatics: Establishing Characteristics of Contemporary US Landfill Quantities and Practices (1960-2013). Environmental Science and Technology (Sep 2016).
- Pons, José C. The Social Roots of Ecological Degradation of El Nevado de Toluca natural protected area, Mexico. Tropical Resources: Bulletin of the Yale Tropical Resources Institute 2015. Vol 34, pp. 25-35.
- Pons, José C., and A. Herinianina. Mahafaly Dictionary: Over 3,000 Mahafaly Dialect words translated to English and Malagasy. The Endangered Languages Project.
Jackson Perry joined the PhD program in 2014. His research examines the spread of the eucalyptus tree genus to the Mediterranean region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He focuses on the politics and science of forestry in modern Europe and the Middle East, the emergence of transregional scientific networks and institutions, and the place of large-scale forest transformations in the onset of the Anthropocene. His research has been supported by research grants from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and the Forest History Society. Before coming to Georgetown, Jackson completed a master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies at New York University. When he isn't reading about forests, Jackson is probably jogging in Rock Creek Park.
Hillar Schwertner joined the PhD program in 2013. His research examines the transnational water history of the California borderlands since 1848. He is especially interested in the development, distribution, and consumption of limited water resources in the transborder metropolis of "Tijuandiego"--the largest and most economically significant of more than a dozen transborder cities that transcend the political boundary. His dissertation seeks to show how the pursuit of this precious commodity has driven the development of a new urban frontier, and how its scarcity might threaten the growth of the region into the future. Before joining the PhD program, Hillar completed a master's degree in Global, International & Comparative History at Georgetown University.
Conference Participation:
- American Historical Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC: 2018
- GU Environmental History Graduate Student Conference, Washington, DC: 2017
- Western History Association Annual Conference, St. Paul, MN: 2016
Alumni
Linda Ivey (2003), Associate Professor, California State University – East Bay. Linda wrote her dissertation on a farming community near Monterey in California (late 19th and 20th c).
George Vrtis (2004), Associate Professor, Carleton College. George’s dissertation was about gold mining in 19th century Colorado.
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), Assistant Professor, Central European History, 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), Assistant Professor, Samford University. Erin’s dissertation was on agriculture in the southern U.S. before, during, and after the Civil War. She received Georgetown's 2016 Harold N. Glassman Award for a Dissertation in the Humanities.
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.
Elizabeth Williams (2015), now holding a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University. Elizabeth’s dissertation was on efforts and discourses surrounding agricultural modernization in greater Syria, c. 1870-1940. Her principal adviser was Dr. Judith Tucker.
Alan Roe (2016), now holding a post-doctoral fellowship at the College of William & Mary. Alan's dissertation was on the formation of national parks in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.
Graham Pitts (2016), now holding a post-doctoral fellowship at North Carolina State University. Graham's dissertation was on famine in twentieth-century Lebanon.
George Vrtis (2004), Associate Professor, Carleton College. George’s dissertation was about gold mining in 19th century Colorado.
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), Assistant Professor, Central European History, 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), Assistant Professor, Samford University. Erin’s dissertation was on agriculture in the southern U.S. before, during, and after the Civil War. She received Georgetown's 2016 Harold N. Glassman Award for a Dissertation in the Humanities.
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.
Elizabeth Williams (2015), now holding a post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University. Elizabeth’s dissertation was on efforts and discourses surrounding agricultural modernization in greater Syria, c. 1870-1940. Her principal adviser was Dr. Judith Tucker.
Alan Roe (2016), now holding a post-doctoral fellowship at the College of William & Mary. Alan's dissertation was on the formation of national parks in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation.
Graham Pitts (2016), now holding a post-doctoral fellowship at North Carolina State University. Graham's dissertation was on famine in twentieth-century Lebanon.
