Dr. Shawn Miller

Shawn Miller is an environmental historian of Latin America whose published work examines historical commons, including, among other things, Brazil’s colonial forests and Rio de Janeiro’s urban streets. He earned a PhD in History at Colombia University (1997) and is currently professor of history at Brigham Young University. His most recent book, The Street is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge University Press, 2018), describes the transformation of vibrant public spaces into distressing traffic corridors and considers the consequences for Rio’s urban culture and urban mortality. His current research on the unfinished Pan-American Highway emphasizes the environmental impacts of infrastructe in the developing world. The highway was proposed as a shared international commons that would link the nations of America in fraternity and commerce, but after 50 years of construction, ecological concerns about the highway and political concerns about human migration thwarted the highway’s completion. Dr. Miller is a native of Washington State, a descendant of lumberman, fisherman, and auto workers whose influence has shaped his historical interests. He currently chairs Provo City’s Agricultural Commission, which works to promote local agriculture and preserve local farm land.

RCC Research Project: Panamericana: Natural Obstacles and Environmental Impacts along the Long, Unfinished Pan-American Highway

Selected Publications:

• The Street is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• An Environmental History of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Translations in Korean and Chinese.
• Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
• “Automotive Enclosures. The “Nature” of Rio de Janeiro’s Streets and the Elite Domination of the Urban Commons, 1900–1960.” Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 14:3 (2017): 487-510.
• “Minding the Gap: Pan-Americanism’s Highway, American Environmentalism, and Remembering the Failure to Close the Darién Gap.” Environmental History 19, no. 2 (2014): 189-216.
• “Stilt-root Subsistence: Colonial Mangrove Conservation and Brazil's Free Poor.” Hispanic American Historical Review 83:2 (May 2003): 223-53.