Associate Professor
About
I work at the intersections of environmental history, history of science, and international relations. My first major research project culminated in The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (Columbia University Press, 2018). In the wake of the Second World War, internationalists identified science as both the cause of and the solution to world crisis. Unless civilization learned to control the unprecedented powers science had unleashed, global catastrophe was imminent. But hope could be found in world government. The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment tells the story of how cosmopolitan scientists and bureaucrats affiliated with UN agencies set out to make individuals conscious of their membership in a world community and ended up building the international knowledge infrastructure that made the global-scale environment visible.
My new project emerged out of my fascination with scientists’ scale-making practices, experiences teaching global environmental history and “Big History,” and the urgency that the Anthropocene inspires for reflection on epochal ruptures. “The Holocene Is History: Human Nature at the End of the Last Ice Age” explores how scientists from the late-nineteenth century to the present assembled fragmentary traces of the past to explain the origins of civilization. The early Holocene provides a fertile field for interdisciplinary experimentation because it occupies a liminal scale between the geologist’s unfathomable deep time and the historian’s chronicle of generations. It is the period in which natural history and human history, the biologist and the archaeologist meet as equals. The stories of world altering floods, megafauna extinctions, and agricultural origins that spin out of these encounters provide ecological and moral baselines for the current environmental crisis.
Undergraduate Courses:
Global Environmental History, HIST/ENVIRON 237
Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, HIST 285/RC 275
The Conquest of Nature, HIST 401/INTLSTD 401
Zoom: A History of Everything, HIST/EARTH/ENVIRON 238
Stories from Deep Time, HIST 197
Graduate Courses:
Environmental History, HIST 682
World and Global History, HIST 610
Selected Publications:
The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth (Columbia University Press, 2018).
“Sociology,” in Mark Bevir, ed., Modernism and the Social Sciences: Anglo-American Exchanges, cc. 1918-1980 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
“Fabricating Unity: The FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World,” Historical Social Research, 40: 2 (2015), 174-201.
“Beyond the Cephalic Index: Negotiating Politics to Produce Unesco’s Scientific Statements on Race,” Current Anthropology 53, supplement 5: The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks (April 2012): s173-s184.
“The View from Everywhere: Disciplining Diversity in post-World War Two International Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45: 4 (Fall 2009): 309-329.
“Standardizing Wounds: Alexis Carrel and the Scientific Management of Life during World War I,” British Journal for the History of Science 42: 1 (March 2008): 73-107.
Affiliation(s)
- Department of History
- Program in Science, Technology & Society
Field(s) of Study
- Global environmental history
- History and sociology of science, focusing on 20th century environmental and human sciences
- International organizations and international development
- U.S. and the World
