Alumni

Clark L. Alejandrino (2019), Associate Professor, Trinity College. Clark wrote his dissertation on typhoons in South China from the fifth century to the twentieth century. A revised version is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Rob Christensen (2022), Americas Researcher, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Rob wrote his dissertation, “Worlds in Conflict: Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Challenges, and the ‘Conquista del Desierto’ in the Making of Argentina, 1870–1900,” on the dispossession and resettlement of Indigenous groups in northern Patagonia and the Pampas. Articles based on this dissertation are forthcoming in Ethnohistory and History Compass, and he is currently revising the dissertation into a book manuscript.

Meredith Denning (2018) wrote her dissertation about the United States and Canada’s transnational management of the lower Great Lakes over the course of the twentieth century. She is Executive Director of the Georgian Bay Association.

Peter Engelke (2011), Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council. Peter’s dissertation was on city planning in Munich from the 1960s through the 1980s. He is co-author, with John McNeill, of The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (2016).

Chris Gratien (2015), Academy Scholar at Harvard University, 2016–17, and Associate 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. His revised dissertation appeared as The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2022). It won the Nikki Keddie Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association.

Faisal Husain (2018), Associate Professor, Penn State. His dissertation examined the role of the Tigris and Euphrates in the establishment of Ottoman state institutions in the empire’s eastern borderland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Oxford University Press published his revised dissertation as Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (2021). He is currently co-editing a book on the global histories of animals, under contract with Oxford University Press, with Emily Wakild of Boise State University and Nancy Jacobs of Brown University.

Linda Ivey (2003), Professor and History Department Chair, California State University–East Bay. Linda wrote her dissertation on a farming community near Monterey, California, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is co-author, with Kevin Kaatz, of Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps (ABC-Clio, 2017).

Matthew P. Johnson (2021), Environmental Fellow at the Princeton University High Meadows Environmental Institute and, from 2022 to 2024, an Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Cambridge University Press published the revised and abridged version of his dissertation in 2024 as Hydropower in Authoritarian Brazil: An Environmental History of Low-Carbon Energy, 1960s–1990s. In his current position, he is drafting a book about Caribbean oil refineries, c. 1910s–2010s, and teaching environmental history at Princeton.

Marc Landry (2013), Associate Professor of History and Director of Center Austria, University of New Orleans. Marc’s book Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age was published by Stanford University Press in 2025. It won the 2026 George Perkins Marsh Prize, sponsored by the American Society for Environmental History, and the 2025 Baker-Burton Award in European History, sponsored by the Southern Historical Association. He is editor of Contemporary Austrian Studies, and his research has also appeared in journals including Environmental History and the Journal of Global History. In 2016, Landry was the Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor in Austrian-American Studies at the University of Innsbruck.

Erin Stewart Mauldin (2014), John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History, University of South Florida. Erin’s dissertation was on agriculture in the southern United States before, during, and after the Civil War. She received Georgetown’s 2016 Glassman Award for the best dissertation in the humanities. It was published in revised form as Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South by Oxford University Press in 2018 and won the Wiley-Silver Prize in 2019. She is also co-editor, with John McNeill, of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Global Environmental History (2012; second edition, 2025) and co-editor of the Environmental History and the American South book series at the University of Georgia Press.

Robynne Mellor (2018), Professor and Department Chair, Eastern New Mexico University–Ruidoso. Robynne wrote her dissertation, “The Cold War Underground: An Environmental History of Uranium Mining in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union, 1945–1991,” on the ways in which access to uranium and diplomatic choices shaped landscapes and bodies in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union. Together with her husband, Oliver Horn, another Georgetown History PhD, Robynne runs a historical consulting firm in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Robert Shields Mevissen (2018), Assistant Professor, Culver-Stockton College. His dissertation focused on hydraulic engineering projects on the Danube River, transnational networks, and civic engagement in the German- and Hungarian-speaking halves of the late Habsburg Empire. His revised dissertation was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press as The Danube Empire: An Environmental History of Habsburg State Building and Civic Engagement (2025). His current research examines environmental justice, (im)migration, and climate resilience, comparing Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Vienna, Austria, over the past fifty years.

Emma Moesswilde (2025), Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Elon University. Her research investigates relationships among climate change, gender, and rural life, with a focus on the Northern Atlantic world before 1800. She has published in journals including Nature and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and on websites including Environmental History Now and Active History. At Elon, she teaches courses on the history of food, climate change, agriculture, and global and local environments.

Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya (2024) earned her PhD in environmental history from Georgetown University, focusing on the early twentieth-century development of Brazil’s oil industry. Her dissertation won Georgetown’s Glassman Award for the best dissertation in the social sciences. Her interdisciplinary research integrates geology and ecology to explore deep-time narratives of humanity’s energy pursuits. In May 2025, Natascha began a postdoctoral project examining the transformation of the Central Brazil table mountains (chapadas), where the native Cerrado ecology is being converted into large-scale plantations for exports including soybeans and cotton. This work continues her approach of blending geological and ecological perspectives to understand environmental change.

Jackson Perry (2021), Assistant Professor, U.S. Naval Academy. His research focuses on the modern environmental history of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean region in transregional and global perspective. His current book project is based on the research he completed for his Georgetown dissertation, “The Gospel of the Gum: Eucalyptus Enthusiasm and the Modern Mediterranean World, 1848–1896,” which received the 2022 Glassman Award for the best dissertation in the humanities at Georgetown. Jackson previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the New York Botanical Garden.

Graham Pitts (2016), Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi. Graham’s dissertation was on famine in twentieth-century Lebanon. He co-edited the University of Texas Press book Making Levantine Cuisine (2021).

Dylan Atchley Proctor (2022) completed his doctorate in historical epidemiology and environmental history with the thesis “Multidisciplinary Approaches to Infectious Disease History in Twentieth Century Africa,” innovating methods to rearticulate disease patterns in humans and non-human animals in African environmental history. In 2022, he became the first historian to serve as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer—more commonly known as a disease detective—at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Alan Roe (2016) wrote his dissertation on national parks and outdoor tourism in Soviet Russia. His book, Into Russian Nature: Tourism, Environmental Protection, and National Parks in the Twentieth Century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. He also co-edited, with John McNeill, Global Environmental History: An Introductory Reader (Routledge, 2012). Alan teaches high school history in northern Virginia.

George Vrtis (2006), Professor, Carleton College. George’s dissertation, “The Front Range of the Rocky Mountains: An Environmental History, 1700–1900,” won the Glassman Award for the best humanities dissertation at Georgetown. He is co-editor, with John McNeill, of Mining North America: An Environmental History since 1522 (University of California Press, 2017) and, with Christopher W. Wells, of Nature’s Crossroads: The Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).

Elizabeth Williams (2015), Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Elizabeth’s dissertation examined developments in agricultural administration and environmental management in the eastern Mediterranean from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire through the French mandate period (c. 1850–1940), a span that coincided with major transformations in agricultural technologies. Her principal adviser was Dr. Judith Tucker. Stanford University Press published her revised dissertation as States of Cultivation: Imperial Transition and Scientific Agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean (2023).