Teaching
I teach a variety of courses that focus on environmental history, war and society, and modern Europe.  Several of my courses, especially my environmental history courses, transcend national boundaries and place their subjects in a global context.  My classes also heed one environmental historian’s classic advice to go out and get some mud on our hiking boots.  With its tradition of community outreach and dedication to applied learning, Rhodes College is ideally suited for a hands-on approach to history.  Participating in an Overton Park Nature Hike, touring a local biofuel refinery, and canoeing on the Wolf River enable students to better understand local environmental issues and how these translate into global concerns.  To help us make sense of the past, I incorporate a variety of materials, such as primary sources, film, oral histories, novels, art, and music, into my courses.

Research
My scholarship focuses on the evolving relationships among individuals, states, and the environment, particularly in times of crisis and conflict.  My current book project, tentatively titled, A Landscape of Pleasure and Pain, focuses on the intersections of four states – Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland – in the Eastern Alps from the 1860s until the start of the Second World War.  I examine how industry and hiking associations altered the Alps, both physically and symbolically.  Massive construction projects carved the mountainside with roads and railways, much to the despair of conservationists and climbers alike.  But national Alpine clubs also modified the peaks by civilizing the heights with maps, trails and lodges.  Members of these groups projected their competing civic values and chauvinistic visions onto the Eastern Alps, making these mountains contested territory.  Environmental change in the Eastern Alps tells us much about the transformations in modern Central European society, and challenges our assumptions about transnational space.

My next book project will be a global environmental history of the First World War.  The duration of hostilities fundamentally changed how the belligerent countries, their allies, and neutral neighbors allocated and used natural resources.  The demand for raw materials transformed economies and state infrastructure around the world.  Ecological degradation wrought in combat continued long after the armistice.  The Great War altered the natural world.  Examining the First World War from an environmental perspective will illuminate the lasting, global dimensions of the conflict.