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Robert Gioielli

Prof. Dr. Robert Gioielli

Carson Fellow

Rob Gioielli is an environmental historian, with a particular interest in the intersections of race, justice, and the urban environment, as well as the critical history of environmentalism. He is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches courses in history and environmental studies and directs the Blue Ash College Honors Program. His first book explored how the American environmental justice movement emerged from protests and organizing by poor, working class and minority urbanites in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the active destruction of their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. After writing a history of environmentalism from the bottom up, he explored it from the top down, spending a few years researching environmental philanthropy, as well as the culture and politics of international wildlife conservation. His new project brings him back to American cities, and the Rachel Carson Center, to explore how racism has shaped the landscape of metropolitan America and is one of the unrecognized drivers of the climate crisis.

RCC Research Project: How Racism Made the American Metropolis Unsustainable


Selected Publicaitons:

  • Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014.
  • “Environmental and Conservation Movements in Urban America.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American History, edited by Jon Butler. New York: Oxford University Press: 2018. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.601.
  • Foundations and American Environmentalism after World War Two.” Rockefeller Archive Center, Research Reports Online, September 2014. 
  • “Not Quite Suburban: Progressive Politics in Postwar Chicago.” In Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs: History, Politics, and Prospects, edited by Christopher Niedt, 91–104. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.
  • “We Must Destroy You To Save You: Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons.” Radical History Review, no. 109 (winter 2011): 62–82.
  • “Get the Lead Out: Environmental Politics in 1970s St. Louis.” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 4 (May 2010): 429–46.