Prof. Dr. Paul Sutter

Paul Sutter is a professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his PhD from the University of Kansas in 1997. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia from 1997 to 2000, and then a member of the History Department at the University of Georgia from 2000 to 2009. Paul is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press, 2002) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (University of Georgia Press, 2015); he is coauthor of The Art of Managing Longleaf: A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach (University of Georgia Press, 2010), and coeditor of Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 2009). Paul has published numerous articles and book chapters on the American wilderness movement, southern environmental history, US imperial environmental history, and environmental historiography—including a recent state-of-the-field essay in the Journal of American History. He is the series editor for “Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books,” published by the University of Washington Press, and he was the founding editor of the “Environmental History and the American South” book series published by the University of Georgia Press. Paul has held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Institutes of Health. He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the US Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904–1914, which interprets American expansion and imperial public health through the lens of environmental history.

RCC Research Project: Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics

Selected Publications:

• Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.
• “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal.” Isis, no. 98 (2007): 724–754.
• “The World with Us: The State of American Environmental History,” and “Nature Is History.” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (2013): 94–119, 145–148.
• “The Tropics: A Brief History of an Environmental Imaginary.” In Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, edited by Andrew Isenberg, 178–204. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
• “The First Mountain to Be Removed: Yellow Fever Control and the Construction of the Panama Canal.” In “Panama Canal Forum: From the Conquest of Nature to the Construction of New Ecologies,” special issue, Environmental History 21, no. 2 (2016): 250–259.