
Teaching
My approach to teaching stems from my belief in the social and intellectual value of history, and my commitment to empathetic, open-minded, and rigorous pedagogy. As a historian, I think a fundamental understanding of the past is crucial to help people make sense of today’s political and cultural debates. I want students to appreciate the relevance of history to their present—after all, if history is not important, as some say, why does so much contemporary political debate circle on interpretations of past events? Moreover, in a world saturated by online disinformation, a rigorous grounding in history helps people grow more sophisticated in detecting the many distorted versions of the past that are routinely promulgated by malevolent political actors.
I also believe strongly that my subfield, environmental history, offers the chance for students to look at the past in a way that they are not likely to have encountered before. As the impacts of climate change accumulate around us and we remain largely politically inert, probing the history of human interaction with the environment could not be more important. Orienting history around environmental use, abuse, access, and dispossession allows students to see another aspect of power in action. After all, one of the greatest indicators of power is who has land and resources, and who can and cannot avoid living in insalubrious or barren environments.
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More below on recent course offerings (syllabi available upon request)!


HIST 421
Carbon Civilization: The Past, Present, and Future of Fossil-Fueled Society
This course tracks humanity’s emergence as a destructive planetary force with special focus on the last two centuries. It familiarizes students with the techniques and major concerns of environmental and climate history and offers ways to think historically about our current era of accelerating ecological destruction and planetary uncertainty. This course will prompt us to think about “energy regimes,” the Industrial Revolution (if this is even a singular thing), and climate change as significant drivers of history, among other phenomena.
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​Equally importantly, we will discover that environmental history widens the frame of historical actors, not merely historical analysis. Environmental historians and historians of allied disciplines have argued for the agency and importance of nonhuman animals in history, and that of even more inert aspects of the world around us: plants, forests, diseases, glaciers, entire ecosystems, and even the “Earth system” of climatic regulation. Environmental history is also an excellent lens for assessing power and inequality within human societies too. Natural resources are not evenly consumed worldwide, while environmental harms are disproportionately borne by those with the least political and economic power.​
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Above all, this course asks students to meditate on complex ideas which are at the heart of modern life: the relationships between control of natural resources, proximity to environmental hazards, and political power; the tensions and trade-offs between Westerners’ unparalleled standards of living and unparalleled consumptive habits; and the question of how—or even whether—a pathway out of our era of collective ecological self-harm can be developed.

HIST 545:
Historical Methods and Approaches
This class focuses on the mechanics of academic history. Academic historians use evidence – that is, primary sources – to assess the meaning of past events. They then contextualize that meaning relative to previous academic interpretations of events and eras, revising in some way our collective understanding of the past. This process is not easy, and this course is designed to help junior scholars plan, conduct, and articulate their research for maximum success. It also offers suggestions for navigating common difficulties along the research pathway.
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We will focus on obtaining and evaluating primary sources, designing a project, formulating research questions, arriving at an argument, and professional ethics and norms. We will discuss some major historiographical paradigms, but this course is less about theory and more about practice. To that end, we also interrogate the nature of "knowledge work" and how best to produce it.