Teaching
I teach a variety of courses that focus on environmental history, war and society, and modern Europe. Several of my courses, especially my environmental history courses, transcend national boundaries and place their subjects in a global context. My classes also heed one environmental historian’s classic advice to go out and get some mud on our hiking boots. With its tradition of community outreach and dedication to applied learning, Rhodes College is ideally suited for a hands-on approach to history. Among our many excursions, my classes have hiked in the Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park, climbed ancient mounds at the Chucalissa Archeological site, examined old graves at the historic Elmwood Cemetery, toured a local biofuel refinery, visited a wastewater treatment plant, explored the college’s own Level IV certified arboretum, and even paddled voyager canoes (modeled after what French explorers once used) down the Lower Mississippi River. These off-campus adventures help my students to better understand the intricate connections between us and the environment and the ways in which our relationships with nature have changed over time.

Research
My scholarship focuses on the evolving relationships among individuals, states, and the environment, particularly in times of crisis and conflict. My current book project, tentatively titled, A Landscape of Pleasure and Pain, focuses on German and Austrian mountaineers in the Eastern Alps from the 1860s until the start of the Second World War. I examine how the tourism industry altered the Alps, both physically and symbolically. Massive construction projects carved the mountainside with roads and railways, much to the despair of conservationists and climbers alike. But Alpine clubs and tourist organizations also modified the peaks by civilizing the heights with maps, trails and lodges. Members of these groups projected their competing civic values and chauvinistic visions onto the Eastern Alps, making these mountains contested territory. Environmental change in the Eastern Alps tells us much about the transformations in modern Central European society, and challenges our assumptions about transnational space.

My next book project will be an environmental history of the First World War. The duration of hostilities fundamentally changed how the belligerent countries, their allies, and neutral neighbors allocated and used natural resources. The demand for raw materials transformed economies and state infrastructure around the world.  Ecological degradation wrought in combat continued long after the armistice. The Great War altered the natural world. Examining the First World War from an environmental perspective will illuminate the lasting, global dimensions of the conflict.