John R. Stilgoe is an award-winning historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 and photographer who is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at the Visual and Environmental Studies Department of Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, where he has been teaching since 1977. He is also a fellow of the Society of American Historians http://sah.columbia.edu/index.html. He was featured on a Sixty Minutes episode in 2004 entitled "The Eyes Have It" http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/31/60minutes/main590907.shtml.

On his Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences website, Stilgoe comments,

"Education ought to work outdoors, in the rain and the sleet, in the knife-like heat of a summertime Nebraska wheat field, along a half-abandoned railroad track on a dark autumn afternoon, on the North Atlantic in winter. All that I do is urge my students and my readers to look around, to realize how wonderfully rich is the built environment, even if the environment is only a lifeboat close-hauled in a chiaroscuro sea. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~stilgoe/01frame_greetings.html"

Awards

• Francis Parkman Award
• George Hilton Medal
• Bradford Williams Medal
• American Institute of Architects award for collaborative research
• Charles C. Eldredge prize for art-history research