J. R. McNeill
Encyclopedia
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
, USA) is an environmental historian
Environmental history
Environmental history, a branch of historiography, is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time. In contrast to other historical disciplines, it emphasizes the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs. Environmental historians study how humans both shape their...
, author, and professor at Georgetown University
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
. He is best known for authoring Something New Under The Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World.
Biography
McNeill received his BA from Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College
Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
in 1975, then went on to Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
where he completed his MA (1977) and PhD (1981). In 1985 he became a faculty member at Georgetown University, where he serves in both the History Department and the Walsh School of Foreign Service. From 2003 to 2006, he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environmental History and International Affairs, until his appointment as University Professor, a highly distinguished role. He has held two Fulbright Award
Fulbright Award
The Fulbright Award is a scholarship awarded as part of the Fulbright Program to foster international research and collaboration. The program also awards a fellowship to Ph.D.'s to lecture and teach in foreign universities...
s, a Guggenheim fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
His father is the famous University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
historian William Hardy McNeill, with whom he co-authored the book The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003).
Works
McNeill most famous work is Something New Under The Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-century World, which documents the dramatic ways humankind has changed Earth. The book won the 2000 World History Association Book PrizeWorld History Association Book Prize
World History Association Book Prize is an annual book prize given by the World History Association since 1999. It "recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of world history"...
, the Forest Society book prize, among other awards, and has been translated into at least 6 languages.
He has published more than 50 scholarly articles in professional and scientific journals. His other books include "The Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, 1700-1765" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); "Atlantic American Societies from Columbus through Abolition" (co-edited, London: Routledge, 1992); "The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History" (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); "The Environmental History of the Pacific World" (edited, London: Variorum, 2001); the "Encyclopedia of World Environmental History" (co-edited, New York: Routledge, 2003): "The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World History" (New York: Norton, 2003), which he co-authored with his father William H. McNeill; "Rethinking Environmental History: World System History and Global Environmental Change" (co-edited, AltaMira Press, 2007), and "Environmental Histories of the Cold War (co-edited, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
McNeill's latest book is Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
He is working on an environmental history of the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
.
Awards and honors
- 2010: Toynbee Prize, "academic and public contributions to humanity."
- 2010: Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914
- 2001: World History Association Book PrizeWorld History Association Book PrizeWorld History Association Book Prize is an annual book prize given by the World History Association since 1999. It "recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of world history"...
, Something New Under The Sun - 2001: Forest Society Book Prize, Something New Under The Sun