Matthew Klingle is associate professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he also served as director of the Environmental Studies Program. He received his BA from the University of California at Berkeley and his PhD from the University of Washington. His research and teaching focus on the North American West, environmental history and humanities, urban history, social and cultural history, and the history of science, technology, and medicine. He has received fellowships and awards for his work from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and US Environmental Protection Agency among others. He also held a national fellowship from the Environmental Leadership Program, a nonprofit organization training emerging leaders from wide-ranging social and professional backgrounds to enhance diversity in the US environmental community. In 2006 he received the Sydney B. Karofsky Prize, Bowdoin’s annual teaching prize for junior faculty. He is the author of Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, which received the biennial Ray Allen Billington Prize in 2009 for the best book on frontier, border, and borderland zones from the Organization of American Historians. His current project, Sweet Blood: Diabetes and the Changing Nature of Modern Health, explores how today’s health crisis grows from our changing relationships with nature and shifting patterns of social inequality in the United States and the world from the late-nineteenth century to the present day.
RCC Research Project: Sweet Blood: Diabetes and the Changing Nature of Modern Health
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Sweet Blood: Toward an Environmental History of Diabetes
Selected Publications:
- ed. “Introduction” in “Making Places, Shaping Cities: Narrating Spatial History in Three American Cities.” Special issue, Journal of Urban History 44 (July 2018): 576–81 (with articles by Tracy Neumann, Laura E. Ferguson, and John Gilbert McCurdy).
- “The Multiple Lives of Marjorie: The Dogs of Toronto and the Co-Discovery of Insulin.” Environmental History 23, no. 2 (April 2018): 368–82.
- “Atlantic Rivers, Lost and Found.” In Take Me to the River: Photographs of Atlantic Rivers, by Michael Kolster, 213–27. Staunton, VA: George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016.
- “Inescapable Paradoxes: Diabetes, Progress, and Ecologies of Inequality.” Environmental History 20, no. 4 (October 2015): 736–50.
- “The Nature of Desire: Consumption in Environmental History.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, edited by Andrew C. Isenberg, 467–512. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.