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Edmund Russell was a Carson Fellow from October 2010 to May 2011 and in July 2012.
Edmund Russell is professor at the Department of History at the University of Kansas. Formerly he was an associate professor at the Department of Science, Technology, and Society and the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and his PhD from the University of Michigan. His research focuses on environmental history and the history of technology. Professor Russell has published on the environmental history of warfare, the impact of human beings on the evolution of populations of other species, the use of organisms as technology, and the value of science for historians, and environmental policy making. His work has won prizes from the American Society for Environmental History, the Society for the History of Technology, and the Forum for the History of Science in America.
At the Center, Russell began a new projectinvestigating how neuroscience might help humanists understand the relationship between people and environments. The brain lies at the center of this relationship, because it processes sensory information about the environment and guides responses to this information.
RCC Research Project: Neurohistory (pdf, 19 KB)
Film Interview with Edmund Russell
Selected Publications:
- Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- Ed. with Richard P. Tucker. Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War. Corvallis: Oregon State Univ. Press, 2004.
- War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- “Introduction: The Garden in the Machine: Toward an Evolutionary History of Technology.” In Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History, edited by Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton, 1-16. New York: Routledge, 2004.
- “Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field.” Environmental History 8 (April 2003): 204-228.