Session Four: Faculty Roundtable

Our program will conclude with a roundtable discussion between faculty members and students. We will reflect on the panel presentations in the light of recent developments in the fields of environmental and world histories and discuss possible directions for further research. Lisa Brady, editor of Environmental History, and J. R. McNeill, co-editor of the “Studies in Environment and History” series at Cambridge University Press, will offer tips for publishing articles and books.

J. R. McNeill (moderator) is a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. He has cheerfully served two masters, as a faculty member of the School of Foreign Service and the history department, since 1985. 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; and writes books, and directs Ph.D. students, mainly in environmental history.

Lisa Brady is the chief editor of Environmental History and teaches courses in North American and Global Environmental History, World History, and Historiography at Boise State University. Her current research project focuses on the history of conflict and environment in Korea during the 20th century. Her first book War Upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (2012, University of Georgia Press) is an analysis of the ways ideas of nature shaped Union strategy in several campaigns during the Civil War. Her other publications include “The Wilderness of War: Nature and Strategy in the American Civil War” (Environmental History, 2005), “Life in the DMZ: Turning a Diplomatic Failure into and Environmental Success” (Diplomatic History, 2008), and “Devouring the Land: Sherman’s 1864-1865 Campaigns” (War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age, ed. Charles E. Closmann, Texas A&M Press, 2009).

Dagomar Degroot is a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. His ongoing projects trace the human consequences of seventeenth-century cooling in the Arctic; investigate connections between climate change and conflict; and identify social responses to environmental changes in outer space. Professor Degroot is the founder and director of HistoricalClimatology.com. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network. He hosts the Climate History Podcast, is the secretary of the International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations, and is on the steering committee of the War and Environment Network.

Kathryn de Luna is a professor of African history at Georgetown University. She specializes in the precolonial histories of Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. She has conducted fieldwork among fifteen societies in five countries in Eastern and South Central Africa and regularly publishes in the fields of history, linguistics, and archaeology. Professor de Luna has published on the histories of food, environment, gender, and early African political culture in south central Africa. She is pursuing more recent interests in mobility and the history of emotions, affect, and the senses in her scholarship and teaching.

Timothy Newfield is a medieval environmental historian and historical epidemiologist at the Princeton Environmental Institute, where he is currently a research associate. 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). He has taught medieval, environmental, and medical history, and most recently led a junior seminar on disease in premodernity and a graduate seminar on medieval environmental history. Dr. Newfield will join Georgetown University as an Assistant Professor in History and Biology in January 2017.