Ellen Stroud
Associate Professor of History
216 Weaver Building
University Park, PA 16802
Phone: (814) 865-3796
Curriculum Vitae:
Education:
PhD, Columbia University, 2001
MA, University of Oregon, 1995
BA, University of Michigan, 1988
Biography:
I am a U.S. environmental historian with a particular interest in the nature of cities. My first book, Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (University of Washington Press, 2012) looks at the ways in which the twentieth-century growth of cities in the northeastern U.S. fostered the return of forests to the region. My most recent book project was an environmental history of dead bodies in the United States, looking at the ways in which corpses and corpse disposal practices have shaped American landscapes and ideas about nature.
Recent Publications:
“Returning to the Slough: Environmental Justice in Portland Oregon.” In The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change, Char Miller and Jeff Crane, eds., 79-99. Louisville, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2019.
“Law and the Dead Body: Is a Corpse a Person or a Thing?” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 14 (2018): 115-125.
“The Nature of Traveling Corpses.” Modern American History 1:3 (November 2018): 419-424.
“Photographing Slow Disaster: Zoe Strauss’s ‘Grand Isle Beach.’” Environmental History, 21:4 (October 2016), 719-729.
Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).
Awards and Service:
American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, 2013-2014.
Membership, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science, 2013-14.
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. National Humanities Center, 2009-10.
National Science Foundation Scholar Award, 2005-8.
American Council of Learned Societies/Andrew W. Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow, 2004-5.
Charles Warren Fellow. Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Seminar topic: The Culture and Politics of the Built Environment, 2004-5.
Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History. Award for the best environmental history article published outside of the organization’s own journal, 2000.