Teaching

Selected descriptions of undergraduate classes I have designed. If you are interested in more information or the latest version of a syllabus, please contact me.

Mythbusting Tropical Nature

This first-year survey uses historical methods to deconstruct three widespread myths about tropical nature, the people who live in them, and what “fixes” both require. Each of the myths examined—primeval wilderness, the population bomb, and the irrational peasant— appear in twenty-first century policy debates, but each has deep roots that often reach to times and places far removed from the today’s tropical world. In this class, we will explore why these myths have proven so resilient, despite repeatedly being revealed as untrue or at best misleading, and how their use serves to redirect attention away from the role played by outsiders in altering and degrading tropical ecosystems. By the end of the class, students will be equipped to spot these myths and, using the tools of historical inquiry, analyze an environmental news item using the digital platform StoryMaps.

Climate Crisis and Social Change

Today’s anthropogenic global warming is unprecedented in scale, but climate change is not a new problem for human societies. What can history tell us about the relationship between people and a changing climate? How did people in the past understand the environment around them, and how did that perception shape their response? Who, exactly, is a climate refugee? What does your class, race, and gender have to do with how you experience changes in the environment? This class explores these questions, and others, in ancient, early modern, and contemporary case studies from around the world. By taking a historical perspective on climate change, students will learn that human behavior is never predetermined by environmental forces—but it is conditioned by them, along with politics, culture, food production, trade, and available technology. In addition to historical scholarship on climate change, students will use LANDSAT images, fossil pollen records, and “Cli-Fi” novels to critically assess what it means to live in the “age of humans.”

Eco-Fascism: A Global History

Fascist political movements around the world have long centered the environment in their rhetoric and policy agenda. In this survey course, students will explore how fear of the Other has resonated with anxieties about the loss of “pristine” nature, and how promises to redeem the “homeland” from the harmful influence of outsiders appeals to some environmentalists who are generally regarded as leaning to the political left. Using primary sources and selected secondary readings, we will discuss topics from the “blood and soil” ideology of the Nazis, through xenophobic anti-immigrant campaigners in the United States and the forced removal of indigenous people from national parks, to white supremacist terror around the globe in order to show the surprising—and chilling—affinity between authoritarian ethno-nationalism and a love of “nature.” This is a discussion-based class that engages with controversial actors and inflammatory subject matter. For environmentally-minded students who care about social justice, it is essential to acknowledge the ways that environmentalism has been, and continues to be, racialized, and how mass violence has been justified on ecological grounds.

The Environmental History of the Americas

Students in this course will explore the history of North, Central, and South America through the lens of human-nature relations. Through readings, lectures, and discussion, students will examine how “environmental” problems like deforestation, declining biodiversity, and pollution are inseparable from social conflicts like colonial domination, uneven capitalist development, and political violence. Discussions will span the first humans settlers in the Americas, the transformation and management of ecosystems by indigenous groups, the devastation and remaking of the land through the colonial period, and the cycles of industrial commodity production. Lectures and class discussion will include primary sources, maps, and multimedia. Some of the big questions we will ask throughout our discussions are: Who is responsible for environmental change? What is “natural” and who gets to define it? What do the immense diversity of ecosystems in North, Central, and South America have in common?

Narcolandia: An Environmental History of Drugs

Drugs are among the most valuable commodities on earth, rivaling petroleum in share of the global economy.  Yet compared to the energy sector, the role played by drugs in environmental change has attracted little attention.  This class will explore how drugs—their production, trade, consumption, and the policing thereof—have reshaped landscapes and societies around the world.  From plantations in the Caribbean and India to the hidden jungle factories of Latin America, students will examine how drugs operate like other commodities, as well as what sets them apart.  As essential components of the global economy, drugs are emblematic of the ecological transformations that capitalist development has wrought on the natural world and the people who inhabit it.  Students will survey the historical literature on drugs and craft their own arguments about the “place of drugs”—Narcolandia—in the making of the anthropocene.

Authoritarianism, Democracy, Nature

Nature is not a socially neutral concept: ideas about what nature is, how to use it appropriately, and what parts of it deserve to be protected reflect the cultural values of the society that create them. This class explores how authoritarian and democratic political systems around the globe have envisioned nature and crafted policies both to use and to protect their environment. Students will explore what differentiates authoritarian and democratic environments, what assumptions and policies they have had in common, and how the relationships between human and non-human nature have changed over time.

Gaia and the Global Cold War

The modern concept of a global ecology, most famously described in James Lovelock’s “Gaia Theory,” is a product of a decades-long political conflict that threatened to destroy all life on the planet.  Although the twentieth-century Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is now almost thirty years in the past, its scientific, environmental, and political legacies are all around us. This course approaches the Cold War as a global environmental phenomenon, the emergent result of many local and regional conflicts that became entangled in the rivalry of superpowers and reshaped that larger conflict in turn. The readings and class discussion will decenter the United States and Soviet Union in order to focus on the “Third World” places that supplied the great majority of the combatants, strategists, and casualties of the Cold War. The superpowers will not disappear altogether, but rather recede into the margins of events driven, if not ultimately determined, by actors and processes in the countries of the Global South. The historical study of the Cold War has blossomed in recent years as new sources have been made available and innovative approaches have challenged longstanding assumptions. This course uses primary sources and some of the most influential new secondary literature in order to demonstrate the diverse array of interests involved in the Cold War, as well as the profound legacies of that ideological conflict in the landscapes, institutions, and politics of the twenty first century.