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Rob Gioielli is an environmental historian whose work focuses on the intersections of race, justice and sustainability in American cities. His first book, Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago (Temple UP 2014) examined how the supposed decline of American cities after World War Two was actually a form of environmental destruction, and fomented forms of grassroots activism that presaged the contemporary environmental justice movement. His current work continues this exploration of how race and environmental shape the modern metropolis. His work has been also published in the Journal of Urban History, Radical History Review and AmerikaStudien. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College, where he also directs the UCBA Honors Program. He was previously a Carson Fellow in 2010-11, and in beginning in July he will be a ACLS/Mellon Community College Fellow for 2021-22.
RCC Research Project: Race, Sprawl and Sustainability: How the American Way of City Building is Killing the Planet
Selected Publications:
- Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, May 2014. Paperback July 2015.
- “Pruitt-Igoe in the Suburbs: Connecting White Flight, Sprawl and Climate Change in Metropolitan America” for “Bounded Democracy,” special issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien, edited by Bryant Simon and Anke Ortlepp. December 2020.
- “Don’t Do it in the Lake: Gordon Sherman and the Public Interest in Postwar Chicago,” for City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History, William Barnett, Kathleen Brosnan and Ann Durkin Keating, eds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.
- “We Must Destroy You to Save You: Highway Construction and the City as a Modern Commons,” Radical History Review, Issue 109, Theme: “Enclosure,” Winter 2011.
- “Get the Lead Out: Environmental Politics in 1970s St. Louis,” Journal of Urban History, 36 (4), May 2010.